The product gets its name OneTouch from a button on the front of the drive. Press it and it activates the Dantz Retrospect backup software. (It can also be configured to start some other software.) I was already a fan and user of Retrospect - you can read a review of that I did a little while ago for the C Net/ZD Net sites. Once you do your initial configuration of what you want regularly backed up, all you have to do is hit the button, make a couple of mouse clicks, and your backup can run while you are at lunch. Before, I was using Retrospect to write to CD-Rs or CD-RWs, and I had enough data that I had to hang around and swap disks.
I've already started to use it as a regular drive, too. While I've only had it for a week, I can tell you that it is fast and quiet. In fact, given the crowded and somewhat fragmented state of my regular internal hard drive, I can say that from regular usage I can't tell the difference in access times, although I'm sure they would show up if you tried to do some real benchmarking. Given all the space, I'm finally able to start playing around with the video-editing software that I bought but hardly used. (Before, I didn't have enough space to hold more than a small amount of the raw video files imported from my digital camcorder.)
Its portability is also a factor. I can move it over to my laptop easily, and when I finally do get a new desktop computer it will be very easy to move — in fact, it will come in very handy in moving files.
It actually looks pretty good, too, with an aluminum body, blue end plates and a pulsating blue drive light — not that anyone would buy a hard drive for its looks when you are probably hooking it up to a beige or black box.
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?