Maxtor Goes Mini With New OneTouch III
Posted by Melissa Perenson | Monday, April 17, 2006 5:05 AM PT
Maxtor finally joins the ranks of major hard drive manufacturers offering a portable drive with its new OneTouch III Mini Edition. Western Digital recently began shipping the latest in its WD Passport line, a 120GB model; and Seagate shipped its 160GB Portable External Hard Drive--the first portable external drive to use perpendicular recording.
The new Maxtor drive lacks the mondo-sized capacity of the Western Digital and Seagate models, but this sleek model does have two unique touches. Firstly, like its desktop-sized siblings, the OneTouch III features a button for initiating a backup. The other unique feature is the drive's software bundle: Maxtor's own automated backup software; Maxtor Sync, for synchronizing files between two or more computers; and system rollback software for reverting your operating system and apps to an earlier point in time without affecting the data on your system.
Portable hard drives are a great way to transport large quantities of data around. I rely on one myself for backup and for storing digital photos when I'm traveling. What have been your experiences with portable hard drives?
I've had good experiences with external hard drives, except for trying to access it from my network. I have two computers, upstairs and downstairs, networked together on a wireless connection. I can never seem to access the external HD from upstairs, but i'm sure that's less a hard drive problem and more a "I'm crap at networking" problem.
My experiences with windows and its propensity for failure and vulnerabilities over the years made me rethink data storage a couple of years ago. Now I have both a WD protable 160 g ext hard drive on my desk and a portable hard drive for my laptop. This way if my system fails on either computer and they have, my primary business files and critical or important personal files are safe on a drive I only have on when I need it. With viruses and bugs this is even more the reason to go this way.
I learned this lesson the hard way, and I do mean the hard way, and I recomend this to anyone with anything important on a computer.
When I first did this people asked me why bother and laughed, no one is laughing any more as most have had failures and lost data, most recent was a neighbor who lost 600 itunes songs.-- oh well
Now people ask what do I need and where do I get it.
Now everyone who knows me does what I do because they know I don't like getting screwed more than once.
keith le febvre
>> I have two computers, upstairs and downstairs, networked together on a wireless connection. I can never seem to access the external HD from upstair <<
Wow. That's very insightful. You should send a cerified letter to the Maxtor CEO and BoD. They'd probably fix this for you. Maybe even introduce a new "dork elite" version of the drive.
I've only had problems with an external harddrive when i tried running a program by SanDisk. The program would try to automatically take photos off the flash card in my SanDisk flash reader. Not only did it not find the photos and put them on my internal harddrive, but it also kicked my Maxtor One Touch II off my USB bus. I couldn't access my One Touch II at all once I ran that program due to a long-winded write error that would pop up in my task bar. After uninstalling the program and restarting the PC, I was able to read off my One Touch II again. WHEW! This is probably either an issue with Windows or the program that came with my SanDisk reader. Without the program, Windows treats the flash reader like a drive, and I have to manually go into my flash card to retrieve photos. Not a big deal.
John W. Duryea