Customer Reviews

Maxtor B01D300 One Touch 300 GB External USB 2.0/FireWire Hard Drive

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I have owned the 300 GB Maxtor external hard drive for about a year now, and just like my 250 GB external hard drive from Maxtor, it is starting to make an occasional grinding noise when data are accessed from it. Maxtor will tell you to run Powermax diagnostic software on it, then you lose all your data (!!!) and then they will mail you another drive if your diagnostic produces the correct error code. But you had better have another drive to backup anything important - because it will all go down the drain in an instant and a new drive getting mailed to you by Maxtor is no consolation. This has happened to me 3 times now with Maxtor drives. The safest thing to do is to buy a Seagate or Western Digital internal hard drive - and use it to backup everything from the Maxtor drives. Maxtors are not reliable!!!

Just received package last night, set up back-up script, and completed first back up of entire home system. Had no major problems, followed the user manual to the letter. At one point, if the user wants to do the one-touch back-up set-up, pushing the button was supposed to take you to a particular screen, which it didn't. I believe I followed the steps as instructed. Cancelled and did again and it took me to the correct screen. Otherwise worked well, simple set-up overall.

Plenty of space, maybe a little pricey at $1 per Gigabyte but my needs will only likely expand with media intensive files and back-up will be essential. So far so good. I will wait and see what routine back-ups etc will do.

I have a 160GB Maxtor one-touch firewire drive which was working perfectly but has just suddenly died after 14 months. Maxtor's response is that there is nothing they can do.

I also have a newer 300GB Maxtor One-touch II usb/firewire drive on another machine. The software drivers for this in Windows XP have a bug which crashes my PC on a frequent basis.

The drives are very stylish but don't get lulled into a false sense of security by their sleek design and ease of use. The drives may let you down.

My 300 GB external hard drive crashed after 18 months.

When I called Maxtor.com, I found out that they had been bought by Seagate. Furthermore, I was out of warranty and would have to use a data retrieval company if I wanted to try and rescue my data (minimum $1,000).
Their warranty is to replace the drive...meaning your data is lost.

Can someone tell me why Maxtors run so hot. I have many hard drives. Most are quiet and cool. My two Maxtors runs very hot. Not sure of the exact temp but I would say close to 45 degrees C. The Maxtor web site itself says that temps higher than 50 degrees C will reduce HDD life. They say you must have good ventilation. Then why my Seagate, WD, and others run so cool? My Seagate is so quiet, sometime I am not sure if my computer is on or off. On the other computer using a Maxtor, I can tell from the loud noise. Maxtor might be good for occasional use, not for always-on conditions. Don't put critical info on it. I wish Maxtor would have a utility (that doen't delete your data) which monitors the disk temp and provide early warning. Maybe even shutdown your PC gracefully.
At work we have many failures with Maxtor but rare with WD.
This will be the last time I buy a Maxtor.

I'm using this with Windows XP and about 50% of the time, when I press the button to do a backup the Retrospect software they provide blows the computer right out of the water. The blue screen of death appears and the computer crashes. Maxtor has known about this problem for a long time but they won't put out a fix for it.

I ordered the hard drive from AMAZON due to loyality. The price was cheaper at the other sites. I waited for two weeks and I contacted the help department. They sent me a form email stating that the product was no longer available. Looking at their web site, the product was available, but now sixty dollors more expensive. I tried to resolve the issue, but I kept getting form emails and no flexibility to get the product to me at the previously agreed upon price. I bought the hard drive from another site at the original price. It delivered in two days. WORKS GREAT. 5 stars for the hard drive!!

This unit has been humming along nicely since I connected it. Actually, it's very difficult to hear the humming, as the drive is SOoooo quiet.

It's pretty fast, albeit, not as fast as a 7200RPM drive, but I've got it connected via USB2.0, and it's definitely fast enough for my purposes, especially at THIS price.

Although I personally don't want to rely on the drive as a true backup, it DOES give you the ability to make another copy of your HDDs so that you don't have all-your-eggs-in-one-basket. To this end, I found that the "One-Touch" button seems to limit you to only backing up one drive (as far as I can see). I wanted to make copies of the contents of two networked computers, each with two HDDs. From what I see, you have to do this manually ... no big deal, really, and it looks like it CAN be done with a script, but I haven't tried this yet.

FWIW, I reformatted the drive to use NTFS, which worked OK on Win2K, but it did not give me an optimized format, so I redid it using Paragon Partition Manager 5.5.

All in all, I'm very happy with this purchase.
-pvs

I have owned a Maxtor One Touch 160gb Hard Drive Firewire/USB drive for over a year. What a piece of crap, every couple weeks it kept crashing on me of course losing all my data. Mator told me to hook it up by USB not Firewire, then told me to buy a New USB Hub, . Between switching cables and everything else it still crashes. So Buyer Beware, buy a nice Western Digital External Hard Drive, I havent had a Western Digital fail on me yet, I'm running 2.

I have the 250 GB model, bought it from Amazon. I am very happy with it.

I use this device solely for backups. Works awesome, incredibly fast. For the 99.99999% of computer users who DON'T do backups, do yourself a favor and get this drive, and start doing backups.

I'm surprised at the negative reviews. I've had my drive now for almost a year. It's not noisy, it doesn't run hot, and it's never failed.

I think the people reporting that it runs hot must be placing it directly on a surface -- that's a no-no, you're supposed to elevate it a tad with the little rubber feet that are provided. Then the aluminum case provides excellent airflow and cooling.

Regarding those who experienced drive failures: Here's a tip -- don't move the damn thing while it's powered up. I know it's tempting, because it's so small and movable, but that's pretty much guaranteed to cause a drive failure.

And more on drive failure: well, for a backup device, who cares? It's a BACKUP. You're supposed to be counting on a failure of the primary drive OR the backup drive, but not both AT THE SAME TIME. That's what a backup is all about.

And if you're really that concerned about losing the backup copy of your data, fine, get two of these drives. It's still an incredibly affordable backup solution. Then you can keep one of the two backup drives "offsite" at all times -- or at least unplugged, so it'll be safe when the lightning strikes. Not a bad idea at all, if you can afford two of these for backup drives...