Customer Reviews

Maxtor OneTouch 4 Lite 500 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive STM305004OTA3E1-RK

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(41)

 

 

This drive has a serious problem, but it seems maxtor/seagate do not care at all.
I have been using it for about 4 days, when it has suddenly lost its partition table, meaning all of my data was gone - ALL of it.
Searching through the tech support forum, i realized many others are experiencing the same behavior, and there are no replies by seagate.
I tried to contact tech support, and had the pleasure of talking to the rudest, most non caring customer support agent. He basically blamed me for the problem, and just told me "reformat your drive".
Stay away from this product.

I imagine that most people who've given this drive top marks haven't owned it long enough to realize its failings. That's the really insidious thing about it: the drive doesn't fail dramatically. It gives the illusion of working perfectly, and it's only when it's far too late that you realize that you've lost data.

Let's not mince words: this is an absolutely unusable external drive.

I didn't take much heed in the negative reviews that were there when I bought this unit - I'd had experience with Western Digital and Seagate external drives, a slew of brands of enclosures, and dozens of internal drives. I've not had many problems with Maxtor before, and I'd only had the best experiences with Seagate. I figured that an external hard drive controller would be a fairly easy thing to accomplish, if the off-brand imports were getting it down pat.

This does not seem to be the case. The drive seems incapable of ensuring data integrity in the most basic ways:

1. Large files seemingly randomly become wiped and appear as 0 bytes in size.

2. Files become randomly overriden by other files (video file A is on the hard drive. I copy video B to the drive. I notice afterwards that both A and B are copies of video B)

3. Directories and files become corrupt and inaccessible.

4. The drive fails to mount its partitions and requires cycling its power or rebooting to correct.

These problems are not isolated occurrences - they are common enough so that virtually any task that requires an external hard drive is impossible to accomplish over any period of time.

The other negative reviews here suggest that these are severe flaws inherent to the drive controller and that my drive is not just a lemon. Given this, I've no confidence that this drive can be "repaired." I have an external drive enclosure on order from Amazon. When it arrives, I will have to pry the casing open and extract the 500GB hard drive inside (these seems to be no easy way to do this without destroying the casing).

This product is simply unusable.

I purchased one of these from a retailer a month or two ago. First, it started having connectivity problems, where Windows would either not recognize it upon startup or it would "disappear" from view after a certain period of time.

More recently, it stopped working completely. Maxtor's own software claims it has a capacity of ~52 GB and ~532 GB of free space, while Windows will not allow me to access the contents of the drive while asking me if I would like to format. I did a bit of research, and found that unplugging the drive would make it show up correctly (and it did), however it would not restore my data.

Be aware that this exact problem has been reported by more than a few people who own this particular drive, and it is NOT a reliable backup if you must store data of any importance.

Ran like a champ for 2 weeks. Then came up unreadable. I googled the problem - remove drive, reboot, reconnect. It found it but wouldn't read. Reboot - chkdsk found all manner of errors. Lost 75% of data. I was smart enough not to put anything irreplaceable on it. Junk design.

I picked this drive up at a retail store for $100 and was so amazed at the great price. 500 GB for this price was the best deal I'd seen. Could it be too good to be true?

Short answer: Yep.

Longer answer: On the box it states it works with Macs. The software is compatible supposedly, but on start-up my new MacBook Core Duo started acting strange. So after trying to delete the contents of the drive I realized I couldn't. Great.

No big deal, so I reformatted it as the software was less than useless to me. And the new drive popped right up. That wasn't so bad...

Until I tried to copy files to it. It would work for ten minutes, then quit eventually crashing my computer. Finally it stopped showing up all together.

I went to the forums (which are well hidden) on the official site to see if I'd done something wrong. There I saw page after page of the exact same issue, and many others far more severe if it would have worked. This drive is plagued alongside its counterparts as unreliable at best, and at worst, a great way to lose every digital file you love.

Stay far away and thank God for the internet! :D

Got the hard drive and didn't work on my Mac. I called immediately and was told that it's a sofeware problem. The technician promised to send me a software through e-mail within a few hours. I waited for a day and no e-mail. Called again next day and I was promised again that I will receive an e-mail within within one hour. I waited for another day and nothing happened either. I will call them again.

Original review April 23 2008, amended August 13 2008

so... i've read the reviews. some fairly unflattering ones. that scared me. so i read reviews of some other portable external hard drives. they all have bad reviews. the really negative ones seem to focus on 2 things. first, "my data is gone", which is obviously bad. you buy a drive to put data, assuming it will be around. second, "they did nothing to resolve the problem". there are reviews like this under every drive i looked at (some more than others). however, i'm skeptical, so i'm gonna write my review this way:

Day 1
bought the drive at a retail store cuz i wanted a place for music files. i have different music at home and at work and wanted something more universal - and cheap. plus work doesn't like to give up the drive space. don't really care about the software, but i'm sure its fine. the packaging and everything was done for simplicity. loads its software automatically, yada yada.. and there's really no need for a complex manual or anything. so kudos to maxtor for that. they also had a MyBook drive but it was a little more expensive, and i had no preference.
Day 1.1
got it home. its heavier than i expected. you can feel the drives spinning when you pick it up - not vibration, just the centripetal force. makes me nervous. why use a disk drive? why not a bunch of MicroSD cards tucked in there or something? worried about crashing the drive, especially in transport. sure, if you're just using it as a stationary backup device, like they seem to think, it wouldn't matter. but taking in back and forth from home to work, i wonder what the transport will do. it will probably take a few bumps and bruises. tried to look up 'parking' the heads, but haven't found anything yet.
Day 2
loaded files from work and home - music and pictures. all is well enough. still nervous. my bag has a small magnetic closure. wondering if that will affect my data. i've only used about 20GB of the drive lol. i'm sure that won't keep for long. also, found out that Seagate bought Maxtor. that seems potentially problematic if there's ever a problem. hopefully, i'll never have to find out.
Day 3
the power and usb cords are a pain in the butt. i have an extra bag to lug them around. winding em up and unwinding. seems like you could power it from the usb cord alone, but i guess not. that would have been nice. then all you'd need is a single internal, integrated cord. playing music straight from the drive without problems. btw, i don't want an iPod. not enough space - i expect to fill this thing. and i don't want/need a headphone-based music system.

so that's it so far. no problems. some criticisms, but nothing major.

Addendum: August 13
So far no major problems. Its still heavier, bulkier than I would like. Seems like they really do expect it to be used as a spare desktop hard drive and not a portable drive. Also, you have to carry both the usb cord and the power cord. I have a bag for the drive and for the cords. It works ok, but I wouldn't take it on a plane or someplace where it would get bumped a lot. I set up an old laptop as a music station with this drive as the library and things are working well. Buying 500GB seemed like a bright idea, but I'll never fill it up with music (duh). a smaller, portable 200-300GB probably would have done it. But I've started putting movies on it and that's chewing up some space. Again, this is really more of a desktop-style peripheral. If/when I get a full media setup, it will probably make more sense, but by that time, the technology will make this seem arcane :)

I spent days capturing home movies from a DV camera via iMovie. When I tried to access the movies, the video contained in most of the files was from my daughter's Elmo DVDs, which I had earlier ripped to the same drive. I've never seen video files exchange content before, but this has resulted in a giant waste of my time. I can only assume that the drive botched the tables that tell it where each file's data is stored.

I picked up this drive on sale and $99 for 500GB seemed like a deal - in fact as it was for backup I bought two, so they could be swapped on a weekly basis to create an offsite backup system.

After I installed it I immediately found the included backup software was not able to backup my entire system, only select files - the whole drive backup is only available with the pro version. I was disappointed by this because I'd seen the whole drive backup on a Maxtor OneTouch4 Mini, furthermore the Maxtor site doesn't let you download the full version of the software (or even buy it). Still, I wasn't planning on using the included software so it didn't matter too much.

The software as it is is simple to use - definitely aimed at the consumer. But obviously it will only backup you My Documents and other select places - since many applications store important data like you email in places the software doesn't backup you need too be really careful about what you put where - it is possible to teach Outlook and such to store PST files under My Documents but most people are not going to figure that out which kind of defeats the point. If you get this and loose all your email you'll be really unhappy...

The next problem I encountered was that even when I used the proper "safely remove hardware" procedure this drive just does not like to be recognized by my system. I'm running fully patched XP SP2 and I've never had problems with USB drives not showing up. With this drive I could just unplug it, reconnect it and it never shows up again. Any amount of searching for new hardware and other stuff does not work - the only solution is to reboot. Even after the safely remove hardware if I reconnect it often does not show up. And sometimes Windows will see the drive but the little Maxtor backup up doesn't. And once it saw the drive but claimed it had no space on it - which it did.

I couldn't find any solution to this, and given everyone elses comments about connection problems, and given that weekly unplug/replug of drives was going to be necessary I returned it.

I just don't know what Maxtor did with their USB hardware or software - but really my conclusion is steer well away from this drive, there are dozens of alternatives and if you see it going cheap there is probably a reason. Of course you could always buy one, take out the drive and then put it inside your computer or in a different enclosure!

I've only been using this drive for less than 3 months on a windows vista machine, directories keep getting lost with "directory corrupted" errors. A cursory google found that this is a common complaint with this make. Stay away