Customer Reviews

Maxtor E01G300 OneTouch II 300 GB External Hard Drive

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I don't understand the comment about not being able to access individual files or folders: of course you can. If you couldn't, it wouldn't be much of a backup.

The backup software that comes with it (Dantz's Retrospect Express HD) offers two choices: comprehensive backup (recommended) and "duplicate". Both choices let you specify the folders and files you back up. I elected to back up My Documents and all subfolders.

Comprehensive allows you to set a schedule for automatic backups. I chose that, and I run backups every night. The first backup took about an hour, but then each night it back ups only *changes*, so it's very quick. This also allows you to select a restore point if you want to restore a file or folder: you can pick to restore the most recent backup of the file or folder, or the one from a week ago, or three days ago, etc. Once you've picked the backup point for a restore, you can then select the folder(s) or file(s) to restore. The list of files is alphabetic, which makes sense.

Duplicate backup just makes a disk copy of the files: you get the usual structure that you can see via Windows Explorer, and you can restore by a copy command. But Duplicate overwrites the previous duplicate (so no restore points: you just get the last backup, period), and it does not allow you to set a backup schedule.

A couple of points I learned from the Dantz support forum, which has been quite helpful: you want to turn OFF the (OS) monitoring of the Maxtor. In older systems you can do this with Device Manager: right-click the My Computer icon on the desktop. But in my Windows XP Pro, there's no My Computer icon on the desktop: it's now on the start menu. To get the tabbed display that you're used to, hold down the Windows key and press Pause/Break. (Obvious?)

I really like this unit and 300GB offers LOTS of restore points. (When Retrospect Express HD runs out of room on the drive, it starts dropping the oldest restore points.) Even with comprehensive backup, you DO have access to files and folders, but not through Windows Explorer: you use the "Restore" option.

David Pogue of the NY Times recently had a bad hard drive crash. In talking with the tech attempting to recover the data, he was told that ALL hard drives crash--the question is when, not whether. Beware. You DO need a backup. This device and software offers a very easy way to have it.

Goals
1. Have a drive that could be easily be moved between Linux systems for large data transfer.
2. Provide a dual boot capability for Linux/XP without touching my existing NTFS system drive
3. Provide a shared FAT partition that could be used both to move data between the two environments.
4. Backups of the XP system.

Procedure
1. Drive installed on XP without difficulty (USB2) and drive was immediately available.
2. Rebooted from a 2nd IDE drive (moved IDE cable) that had a working Linux installation.
3. I repartitioned Onetouch drive using Linux fdisk with one DOS partition.
4. Transferred Linux installation to drive using rsync
5. Followed procedure given in various usergroup postings (Maxtor provides no support for Linux). Installed 2 stage boot loader (Grub) onto Onetouch drive
6. Removed Linux IDE drive and replace XP IDE drive.
7. System wouldn't boot Linux properly. Turned out that Grub polling of the hard disk order doesn't correctly anticipate the situation when you use the flash USB boot option in the bios. Easily fixed by changing grub.conf manually.
8. Dimension 4600 has bias support for a flash USB drive and by just selecting that option from the boot menu the Maxtor now booted Linux from Onetouch without a problem. Using the standard IDE boot gave me the existing Windows XP install
9. Found I couldn't access the FAT partition (this is probably and XP issue). Had to create a smaller 32Gig partition and format it in Windows to make it accessible.
10. FAT Partition now visible to both OSs.

Comments (in no particular order)
1. Stylish design
2 Drive is warm to the touch (unless in standby). I would imagine mounting it vertically on the supplied base is important for good cooling. I have found if I run the drive steadily for a few hours (e.g. a massive file transfer) it gets warmer.
3. Works as advertised so far
4. Dual boot for Linux went very well
5. Near silent until accessed, drive noise not excessive
6. With only a few hours work, it met all my expectations so can't really ask more than that.
7. Can't comment on reliability (haven't had it long enough)
8. Includes both Firewire and USB2 cables
9. Can't comment on the quality of the bundled software as I haven't used it.
10. When used on the Linux ext3 filesystem it achieved somewhere between 50% and 75% of the speed of a high performance internal IDE. This is likely OS dependent.

I appreciate this is not a mainstream use but thought there might be someone out there trying to do something similar. I don't often feel this positive about a product hence taking the time to write a review.

I use this as one of my backup drives on a Mac OSX machine. I actually have 2 backups one being redundant. When adding external drives to any Mac they should always be reformatted with disk utility. After I formatted them and started to use them, they would crash my machine when they were both on. After talking to the Maxtor support it was determined that all I needed was a different type of driver that I accessed from their website. There is no such thing as a perfect brand of hard drive they all suffer from the same problems. I have known people who have had maxtors for over 10 years with no problems. sometimes you get a lemon and they crap out after 3 weeks. It happens to all of the manufacturers. The point of all this rambling is be vigilant! Do multiple backups of the things that are truly irreplaceable. Pictures should be archived to CD or DVD at least 2 times a year. All it takes is to lose the first 3 years of you children's life to pound this concept home. As for the hard drive you can choose any reputable brand and be reasonably certain that it will be OK. Just don't get USB 1.0 like I did with my first drive. It took 2 days to backup 150gig. It will be tempting to just go with the lowest priced drive if they are the same capacity, but the lower priced drives are USB 1.0. You should buy the largest capacity that you can afford and go with Firewire or USB 2.0
Personally I don't use the backup button or the retrospect software. I use Backup from apple, but I have heard it works just fine.

Just a bit of warning since I didn't know this until I received my OneTouch today. The software that comes with the hard drive doesn't work with Tiger. I imagine there will be an upgrade at some point but as for now, the button on the front is useless since it doesn't do anything without the software.

I bought this for my iMac with the intent of using Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my internal drive to it and bought from the Maxtor. I had no interest in using Retrospect. I use it on my iMac G5 with Firewire and it's fast and quiet and very well made. Also looks great which doesn't hurt. I also appreciate the fact that all the cables are very well made and long enough to place the drive just about anywhere you want.

The drive is nicely packaged, easy to install, and works nicely with the included backup software. However, my first OneTouch and its replacement have both failed in the first six months. Perhaps I'm just unlucky, but this level of reliability is unacceptable in a backup product. To add insult to injury, I have to pay to ship the dead units back to Maxtor.

top rated external (...)(the authoratative hard drive rating site) and for good reason.

Just to comment on some of the bad reviews below, I am sure anyone with a fair amount of technical experiacne can tell you that almost every bad review below is really based on ignorance as to externals, and the reviewers would have had the same exct issues with any other brand.

I strongly recommed that you check out storage review. they have stats from thousands of these drives and for example these are much more reliable than the equivelent seagate, and Maxtor has better warranty response (both are one year) and support.

Anyway although I roll my own externals, for the office we jsut buy them premade like this maxtor. I have four of them and they all run 24/7 (they are known to run cooler than the seagate), and are frequently bounced around with no problems at all.

As far as the "spin down" so worrying another commentor, I suggest he/she READ THE MANUAL! For goodness sakes maxtor's chipset allows you to have either 100% uptime OR energy saving (and with externals drive lifetime saving) by giving the user configurable options on how quickly the drive will respond!

The first rule of critical data is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. I use this as a sort of "junk drive" to put .wma's and .mpegs on for archiving. If it melts down, I'm not going to jump off a bridge.

My experience shows that folks who aren't satisfied w/ a product are full of a need to help keep other folks away. I have had good luck w/ 3 of these drives. One at home, two at work, all Windows XP pro / 2000 / Server 2003. They have all worked fine.

I do not use the onetouch software. i do use the built in Windows Backup and run that from time to time w/ no issues.

So, give it a try. It has worked well for me and I'd recommend it to a total stranger w/out reservation. And if you really need redundancy, buy two. :)

* This brand has never failed me. I bought my first 40GB 4 years ago. It has operated every day since then with no problems.

* I have bought two 300 GB drives of this model in the last 3 months. Again, no problems AT ALL!

* I have one 300 on a PC and another on a Mac. Again, no issues.

* The reviewer commenting about "But Not Really an External "Hard Drive" must be smoking crack. That is a bit harsh, but I have no idea what his problem is. This drive stores and accesses any file you put on it.

* Back in the day, I had a Buslink. It died and took my precious data with it. I am done with that brand forever. So, I can understand how one bad experience can shape other reviewers' opinions. I must say, however, I have five Maxtor externals and they've all been bulletproof so far.

I left this running overnight to do an unattended backup of 12 GB. After 2.7 GB, it stopped because a path name was too long for the destination drive. I had foolishly kept the default E:/Retrospective Duplicates/... but one long path name shouldn't crash the whole operation -- any decent piece of software would skip over the offending directory and keep going with the remainder of the backup.