Customer Reviews

Maxtor A01A250 OneTouch 250 GB FireWire and USB External Hard Drive

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

I just received my Maxtor A01A250 250gb drive today (only 5 days after ordering it, I might mention).
As another reviewer noted, the drive actually has only 233gb of formatted storage, but it's more a mathmatical deal than a loss of storage. In all you still have 233gb of usable storage at your disposal. That's enough to store about 58+/- 4gb movies!

I did my research before ordering & found this drive to be everything I needed. I wanted LOTS of storage for video & audio, I got it. I wanted a simple interface, I got it... two of them Firewire and USB2.0. I'm using Firewire now (I'm out of USB ports right now, but I'll try the USB connection as soon as I get a USB2.0 hub) I wanted a drive with an ON/OFF switch, I got it.
I can't understand why anyone would manufacture an external hard drive and NO way to turn it off. Duh!

The manual states that the drive may write slower than it reads for the first 10 times it's turned on & off. Something about it getting used to things... whatever, it's still pretty fast even if the manual says it's slow.

The case is aluminum and acts as a heatsink, so it does get a little warm to the touch, NOT HOT, as I've had this drive running all day & it's just warm.

The drive came with a plastic/resin cradle for standing the drive on it's side to save space which comes in handy.
It also comes with a Firewire & USB 2.0 cable.

Make sure you have the drive (with or without the cradle) setting on a level surface (or something padded) as I first had the drive "setting caddywhompus" and it rattled. I moved the drive a bit & it's now quiet as a mouse.

I didn't install the entire backup software that came with the drive, as I plan on using it as a storage drive, so I can't comment on how well the backup works. I've never been a fan of one touch backups anyway.

I opted to format the drive to NTFS (highly recommend this) in order to be able to work with LARGE video files. (the drive comes formatted FAT32 which limits you to about 4gb file size)
There's another method to convert the drive to NTFS without formatting, but I formatted anyway.

If you're planning on swapping this drive from an Win XP system to a Win 98 system, DON'T FORMAT IT AS NTFS! You probably won't be able to access the drive in Win 98.
The format took about 2 hrs on my PC- a Dell 2.4ghz P4 with 1gb ram- but when it was done it's ready to use.

I dropped a 1gb file onto the drive for a test & it took less than a minute to transfer the file. I expect this speed will increase in the following weeks.

Add the rebate & this was a nice deal all around.

I purchased a Maxtor 250 gig drive just a short 2 months ago. As a web designer I have many files & projects I regularly need extra storage for. Initially I was very happy with this drive. However, it is already flaking out on me. It was once very fast as I am using Firewire to connect. However, the drive now takes forever to seek and often times out with read errors. There is only 49 gig on this drive. I called Maxtor and they suggested I sent it back in, and they told me I should contact a disaster recovery service. They will not pay for that either. I called a couple disaster places, and they said they have have a stack of those 'one touch drives' to be recovered. "Worst drives ever...they get bad sectors, anything over 180gig is a nightmare..."
Glad I know now. I'll get a different drive. Maybe 2 100 gigs, one to back-up the first. I would not recommend this drive...and if you do get it or have one, back it up on CD/DVD regularly. Any sign of it slowing down, and its gone. Good luck.

I purchased a Maxtor 250 GB external hard drive in April of last year. Last month, just after the one-year warranty expired, the drive started clicking and became invisible to my PC. I fiddled around and got things working again, or so I thought. A few days later, the drive died completely. During the year that the drive worked, I generally was pleased with its performance. However, the reliability was very poor, and dying one month after the warranty expires is incredibly annoying. I would suggest that you check reliability ratings before buying this drive.

I wish I saw the comments on sudden deaths of A01A250 drives when I bought mine in May '04. I was quite happy with the product until I turned it on yesterday and it simply failed to show up as an external drive in Windows Explorer - despite that it worked perfectly well the day before. Then I listened more closely and heard the clicking/stuttering sounds, and after one or two power cycles a loud screeching sound joined the orchestra. Well, thanks to other reviews I know I'm not alone. I guess I'll just stay away from Maxtor till I get over the data I lost :(((

I have been using Maxtor external hard drives for just over a year now and have made recommendations to family and colleagues which have resulted in them buying many of them as well. So with experience with close to a dozen hard drives, we have not had any problems and have nothing but praise for the drives.

First off, with internal hard drive prices for laptops so expensive and so difficult to install, external hard drives that use firewire (IEEE1394) are a great option. These hard drives use both firewire and USB, so you can take the information and hot swap it among multiple computer (like a thumb drive) or keep it plugged in to a single computer for use a secondary hard drive. I have found virtually no speed difference between accessing files on the external hard drive versus the internal.

The automatic backup feature, makes the hard drive all that much more useful. It comes bundled with Dantz Retrospect Express program which is an easy-to-use option for automatically backing up just what you want with a touch of a button. I backup often, usually just punching the button as I go meet to clients. It usually finishes the automated process by the time I return. Because backing up is so easy to do, when I did lose the hard drive on one of my laptops, I barely missed a beat after I got it replaced, simply restoring the drive image to make my new laptop look just like my old one.

I highly recommend Maxtor external hard drives.

I had my external Maxtor for about a year (160
GB Maxtor one touch). Now it is having read errors and I lost some data and photos. I have owned internal drives for over 8 years with no problems. Anyhow, I'm going to try a Seagate external now because I like the convenience of external drives. I recommend that you Buy a Seagate!
Also customer support has a firm policy of not replacing drives after warranty which is when it will fail. So, unless you plan to use this for only 12 months, don't buy it. My posting here will give me $250 worth of satisfaction and perhaps much, much more in lost sales. They claim it's "Hot Swappable" above, well that IS TRUE...It runs very hot and you swap it after a few months with another brand.

Simple plug and play external disk. have being using it for the past one month -- no problems so far. Formatted the disk in NFTS format and using it from a XP and Win 2K boxes. The aluminum case does get *hot*. Ofcourse, how "hot" depends on the sensitivity of the person touching it. Comes with a Firewire & USB 2.0 cable ( which you can use with USB 1.1 port as well ).

Overall highly recommend it.

I bought a Maxtor One Touch I 200-GB drive 6 months ago. It failed completely after 4 months and I lost all my backup data, including original data not stored on my computer.

The error message read that the drive was "...not accessible. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error."

OK, nobody's perfect. So I bought another one, this time a 250GB Model II. After 3 months, same error message, this time for one of my major folders on the drive. Data not recoverable.

Unbelievable. And I now something about hard disk drives since I work for a major storage vendor.

The Dantz backup software is very good. It means nothing, tho, if the hardware fails.

I just got the 250GB unit up and running for our construction/architecture company and it seems to work great. I backed up about 50gb of cad files, .xls files and .jpgs last night and ran some test restores this morning and everything worked great. I'm gonna get a second unit and swap them out every day so I always gave a complete backup offsite. I found the retrospect software to be slightly confusing, but no more so than backup exec.

I just received my Maxtor and found it very easy to set up and install. It is also quite fast. The only disappointment was in discovering that it is NOT 250 gigs. 32 kbts are used on the drive and it has a capacity of 233 gigs. It's a great product exactly as advertised except for that.

This post script is being written a few days after the last one. I encountered a problem with the Retrospect Express One Touch. Attempted to call the software people, Dantz, three times and was put on hold each time for so long I developed a personal relationship with the recording. Never did get anyone to answer. Fortunately the drive still functions just as any hard drive will and it does not take that much longer to do it manually.