Bangalore: Your wish to connect your external hard drive to your computer without having to use the USB cable, will soon come true. Imation has announced the availability of the first wireless USB external hard drive, the Pro WX. The hard drive works just like any other USB hard drive, with one exception, it doesn't require a USB cable.

Wireless USB has been under development for about five years, and some of the first products were demoed at CES 2009, reports CNET News. This technology allows you to connect USB 2.0 devices to a computer wirelessly from up to 30 feet away with a throughput speed of up to 480Mbps.

According to Imation, the Pro WX wireless USB external hard drive offers less than that, with speeds of up to only 120Mbps or 15MBps; this is about three times slower than regular USB 2.0 hard drives. At this speed it can finish copying the entire content of a CD-ROM (roughly 800MB) in about 50 seconds. Other than that, this drive is based on the 3.5-inch desktop hard drive and offers 1.5TB of storage.

The Imation Pro WX features a sleep-mode feature to conserve energy and a one-touch, backup sync button to manually start a backup when needed. The device is compatible with both PC and Mac operating systems. As most computers don't have built-in wireless USB, there are adapters that can be added to the machine.