"It's so big I'll never fill it up!"
Those are my famous last words anytime I get a new hard drive. It's what I said with my first 32 MB hard drive back in 1988; it's what I said when I bought a computer with a 640 MB hard drive; it's what I said with my first 4 GB hard drive; it's what I said when I bought my present computer with a 40 GB hard drive in 2001.
You would think that after all those times of being wrong, I'd learn not to say that. Those drives filled up, and my 40 GB drive is approaching the 15 percent free mark. So it was time to go shopping. Since the rest of my computer is sufficient, I just needed more storage. Instead of adding another internal hard drive, I decided to get an external hard drive.
It's something I wouldn't have considered a couple years ago, since the access speed would have been so slow. But today's drives come with fast USB 2.0 and/or Firewire connections, which are plenty fast enough (Firewire connnections, which I planned to use, should transfer data at speeds of 100 to 400 Mbps. That means even at its slowest, it will perform as good as Fast Ethernet.) After some shopping around, I picked the Maxtor OneTouch 250 GB Drive. It comes with both USB 2.0 and Firewire connections and includes the Dantz Retrospect Backup Software, which can be activated by a button on the front of the drive, hence the name OneTouch. It's price came out to just a shade over $1 per gigabyte, and is compatible with both Windows and Macintosh.
The setup should be fairly easy for an experienced-to-expert computer user, although beginners may get a little confused. After loading the software first, my Windows XP computer smoothly integrated it via Plug-n-Play. It comes with both FireWire and USB 2.0 cables. Its default configuration is as one 250 MB partition, formatted with Microsoft's FAT32 file system. That's probably not the best choice for a file system for a drive of this size; it was probably selected because it would be compatible with Windows 98SE and ME computers. So the first thing I did was reconfigure this to Microsoft's NTFS file system, and after that I split it into two partitions, so that it looks like two separate drives. (You can do both these tasks in Windows XP by going to the Computer Management applet in the Control Panel, and then go to Drive Management. There are instructions on how to do this in the Maxtor manual that comes with the drive.) One partition would be devoted to backups, and one partition of 100 GB would be devoted to media files.
Article comments
1 - jadester
my biggest surprise with this was the cost. Being external, and wireless-enabled, i'd have expected it probably about $50 more minimum.
but, then again, HDD prices are dropping all the time.
Thanks for the review, i am still considering getting one. if i can find the money to spare...lol
2 - Matt Wardlaw
seems like a lot of folks, myself included, have had problems with Maxtor drives going bad. I try to stick with Western Digital(just bought a 120 GB drive)
I know what you are saying....each drive seems like it would be more than big enough, but then you find yourself running out of space. The Western Dig drive was my first external hard drive, and I am totally digging it!
3 - Jim Carruthers
I tend to be very doubtful about anything which promises "one button push" solutions. Considering backups are only required when things go really wrong, I see a lot of things going really wrong with this.
You'd be better off buying a drive, and Retrospect (which is great software, but only if you use a strategy - which "one button" isn't. Most of Retrospect documents are about backup strategies, not about how to use the software).
And when the drive fails, what do you do? Because it will.
But at least it's not a tape drive (you don't want to know what happens when tape backups go bad).
4 - Bruce Kratofil
The OneTouch button isn't necessary to do a backup -- the Dantz software gets installed on your computer, and you can run it from there.
Yes, all drives fail, and all media can go bad, too, so the ultimate strategy is redundancy -- my data files are on my desktop; many are replicated to my laptop; on the external hard drive; and many also get burned to CDs (after wrapping up a project, for instance).
The real problem may be location -- if my house burns down, only part of my data is backed up at remote locations.
5 - Dan
Wonder if anyone can help out with this -- I got the Maxtor 250 One Touch and tried to connect with my Averatec AMD 64 laptop with XP. When I plug in the drive to one of the USB 2.0 ports the computer just freezes, focing a reboot......
I have looked at the Maxtor site to no avail trying to find a possible fix...
Any takers?
thanks
6 - C
same problem as last post...any suggestions?
7 - Bruce Kratofil
It may be a driver problem -- have you loaded the software and drivers that came with the Maxtor hard drive first?