Customer Reviews

Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition 160GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I own several Maxtor OneTouch II and III (3.5") USB hard drives that I use for backup and have be quite happy with them.

This mini (2.5") drive is great! It is compact, lightweight, portable, requires only a USB cable and no power cable. It is reasonably fast for a USB drive. One thing to note, this drive gets it power over the USB cable. The drive comes with a "Y" cable which allows you to plug into two USB ports on our computer if for some reason the drive is not getting enough power using just one. I have not found it necessary to plug in to a second port on any of the computers I've used the drive on. I have tried several alternate USB cables. I found that there is a limit to the length of the cable with which the drive will work. 4 foot and shorter cables seem to work fine, most of the 6 foot cables I tried do not work. I believe that the drive is not getting enough power with the longer cables. Not a big deal, I ordered several 3 foot cables and leave them with each computer I use. Then I can just grab the drive and go.

I'm using it store photographs and my Photoshop Lightroom database. This allows me to move the photos and database between multiple computers, as Lightroom does not yet have the capability to import and export from it's database or merge two databases.

I can't wait for the 250 or 300 GB version of this drive to become available.

This portable hard drive has quickly become the favorite of my collection. It reads and writes at reasonable speeds, is easy to maintain (formatted it for NTFS and use PerfectDisk 8.0 to defrag), instantly mounts on all my workstations (Windows 2000, NT 4 with a 3rd party USB driver, and XP Pro), and - best of all - doesn't require an external power supply (unlike my 3.5" drives). It's quick enough to run simple applications from, and real-time Triple-DES or AES-Twofish-Serpent encryption (I use TrueCrypt, free) without choking or generating too much heat. It's just as fast with sequential read/writes as most of my other portable hard disks, though is slightly slower at random read/write by a slim margin.

Several tricks I used to get my read/write speeds up on my Maxtor OneTouch III Mini (and all my drives, in general) were to disable short file names, increase my cluster size to 32Kb (I generally save large media files), slightly increasing the size of the MFT (Master File Table), push the MFT back on the disk so it has room to grow, disable "last access time" feature, and disable indexing service (I have a 3rd party app to search for files). I don't run native NTFS compression, instead using WinRAR (with PAR2 parity files) if I need to save space safely and effectively. Google any of these tricks to find out how to do them.

I haven't tried the pack-in software - Generally, there's always a better 3rd party app to do the job. Still, I hear it works as advertised.

I think the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini is a very handy little portable drive, that works especially well if configured and maintained properly. It performs respectably, compared to high-end 2.5" portables or T1 non-volatile memory - but costing considerably less per GB. Larger portables, featuring 3.5" hard drives, seem to have a slight edge in performance and cost-per-GB, but aren't nearly as convenient to carry around. The Maxtor OneTouch III Mini's reasonable cost, respectable performance, small size, light weight, and no need for an external power supply are much appreciated.

Excellent little travel drive (little in size, lots of storage). It comes formatted as a SAT drive, which I was going to change to NTFS but decided against it because as a SAT it can be used with multiple operating systems. No separate power required, which makes this an ideal USB plugin device.
The one annoying thing is a huge white eye that could be used as a flashlight. A tiny green or blue light would have done just as well, but less obtrusively.

Bought it on the 11th, and it's dead on the 26th. It was fine up until then - speedy, convenient, small, attractive, lightweight, and ran nicely with my Dell laptop. But a dead hard drive is less than worthless, it's a true pain. Now I have to recover everything from backups. Blah.

drive is very easy to install and has good performance. just plug it in, install the software if you want to setup automatic backups etc and your ready. good build quality too.

I live in Jamaica and was sceptical about buying a computer accessory over the internet cause it might get damaged. However i went ahead and bout the Maxtor one touch 3 hard drive from amazon. It is an excellent buy. I would reccommend it to every one. I have had it for about 3 weeks now and it works flawlessly. I have been a customer of amazon from the day they opened in 1996, but it is mostly books and cd's. I will be definately buying more electronics through them.

This hard drive is small and compact, but quite unreliable. I have tried reformatting this drive and still it grabs onto other programs and freezes them. The programs resume when I disconnect the usb port. It was a bargain, but there is a reason. I really don't recommend this. Why is it that people generally rate a postive review as helpful and a negative review is not? Nevertheless look for a solid brand.

i bought this on sale for $89.99
and with tax thats just under 60 cents per gbyte.
i used it to upgrade an older notebook that still
uses pata. it doesn't come with any drive installation
software, but you can download maxblast or seatools
separately to move your os and data to the onetouch.
inside is a 160gb seagate st9160821a oem 2.5-inch
notebook drive. swap the drives and now my laptop
hd doubled in size, and also went from 4200 2mb buffer
to 5400 8mb buffer. there is a slight and noticeable
performance improvement as a result. stick the old
80gb hd back into the onetouch case and you have a
nice extra utility drive. of course, all the
warranty is void now. but the seagate is working
like a champ.

I bought this about a month ago and so far it has worked great. The additional power connection (on the cable included in the package) to a second USB slot was necessary on my laptop (Dell Inspiron) but is not needed in any of my other desktop computers. Comes with software on the HD that can be installed for additional features like password protection, one-touch backups etc. I filled 80% of the drive and still I see no speed issues. Thumbs up!

I've been using this as a back up drive for over a year now .. I love it. Maxtor One Touch is an amazing brand .. they have since come out with newer versions of this same drive which I would imagine to be just as easy to use, efficient, and so helpful. The file transfers are easy drag and drop or other options which transfer files automatically. The only thing I would like to see is a sleeker, slimmer design.