Customer Reviews

Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo 1 TB 3.5" USB 2.0/FireWire 400/FireWire 800 External Hard Drive

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(42)

 

 

Terrible product, even worse customer service. The drive died after two months, and after an hour on the telephone with their customer service representative she then told me that before she would authorize a warranty replacement she would email me a document of additional terms and conditions, and unless I agreed to every one of these additional conditions they wouldn't honor the warranty. She then (AND I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP) proceeded to ask me a series of "Homeland Security" questions to determine if I was a terrorist. At that point I said I refused to waste any more of my time answering stupid questions, and she said that in that case they would refuse to honor the warranty.

I bought this drive in January 2007 in order to backup my desktop.

It worked fine until June 2007 and suddenly my computer could not recognize the drive. According to Seagate (who now owns Maxtor) the drive had failed and would need to be replaced.

My drive is still under warranty, however, Seagate could not specify a replacement time since the current have no inventory of this drive. In the meantime I will have no drive for my backups. Even though this is Seagate/Maxtor's incompetence I am responsible for a $19.95 for their Advanced Replacement service.

Although this service is not officially required, unless you have your orginal box and packing materials the warranty is voided when shipped other than the very specific way the instruct. So, you must buy the Advance Replacement service to have a replacement drive sent to you. You then return your original drive via the packing materials used for that drive.

All in all this wouldn't be so horrible except that Seagate/Maxtor can not give me any sort of estimate as to how long it will be until I receive the replacement drive.

All my external drives in the past have been Maxtors. So, when I researched my purchase for my first 1TB drive, I didn't think much of the reviews I came upon warning of the failure rate of their 1TB drives. I've had this drive for about 5 months now. I use it to manually back up my files and only do it about once a month, so it has not seen a lot of use. One day it just decided to quit. It makes a bunch of clicking noises and that's about it. I'm going to have to return it for a replacement, but it certainly doesn't inspire much confidence in my replacement, wondering when the next time it's going to fail. I would rather get a different drive. I certainly won't buy Maxtor again.

I set the raid1 and watched the drive completely fail twice. The second time I was on the phone with a tech at Maxtor walking me through the series of instructions. The phone support was some of the worst I've ever had. Do not buy this drive!
--------------
Update August 2007- The third replacement drive failed and is limping along without raid 1. The replacement (4th! in a year) arrived and failed within a day (refurbished). I want my money back! Amazon- why do you put the positive reviews first when there are 26 zero-1 start horror stories? So called support could not locate me previous three returns-- maybe they are using their own drives and lost the data!

I just had a run-in with Maxtor. After purchasing their drive, it failed within 6 months. I was then told that I would be charged a MINIMUM of $700. Data recovery, you see, is apparently not covered by the warranty. If you attempt to recover it anywhere else, since they have to open the drive to do it, you're no longer under the warranty.

I was then told by them that I should never rely upon one backup unit. THE POINT WAS THAT IT WAS THE BACKUP UNIT! For such an expensive item, I think I deserve more service.

The best part was when the tech didn't even bother to try to help. Why bother? They'll get rich off of me by forcing me to send it off to recover the data.

In twenty seven years of buying computer gear I've been pretty lucky, until I bought this device. I purchased this solely because it could be configured as a Raid-1 device, to give me greater data safety by having it mirrored. All looked well, and for about 5 weeks I carefully moved all my data from internal drives to the Maxtor. About 5 weeks after purchase it failed - horrible hard disc noises, and then the pc couldn't "see" the disc.

At this point the worst ever customer service kicked in. Basically Maxtor's view is that they will replace the drive for you, but they won't do anything about your data, and won't let you try and do anything about it either - if you do you void the warranty and you are then left with nothing.

After it failed I noticed a lot of recent poor reviews appearing about this product. It looks like it's a lemon, and when coupled with Maxtor's very very disappointing attitude I would recommend that everyone stays as far away from this company as they possibly can. Don't make the same mistake as us reviewers - learn from it and shop elsewhere.

This drive falls asleep and then has to be unplugged and remounted before you can start working again. I have contacted Maxtor and they stated it was a known issue with no solution...I generally prefer Maxtor's external drives but stay away from this one...It's a dog

I had good experiences with Maxtor large capacity external drives but this one failed in less than 8 months. Drive kept on this repetitive clicking noises and two of my computers could not recognize this drive.
Good thing this dude can be returned for warranty replacement but all my data is lost!

Sure it is a nice idea to have such a huge storage space to back up my system, but the way this thing is set up really sucks. I had to RMA my first one b/c windows XP wouldn't recognize the drive when it was plugged into firewire 800. I had to use USB 2.0 to install the software and it was soooo slow I couldn't bare the thought of going thru that for the duration of me owning this monster. So, I installed the nonfunctional software they provide with this drive and when I try to initiate it, it takes 2 minutes for the main menu to show up. You might be thinking my computer system is slow-NOT at all. I have an AMD 64 FX55 processor, 4 Gigs of RAM, on a DFI nF4 MOBO. It is not slow at all and it should not take that long for any program to load up. I thought photoshop took long, well this program takes the cake. Anyway, after formatting the drive I tried plugging it into a firewire 400 to see if that would be any better-that is when all hell broke loose and it crashed my system. I called the help center at Maxtor and they suggested all of the steps I had already tried: sequentially power off and powering back up, trying different ports, trying to reinstall the software, but all to no avail. That is when they said that perhaps my firewire 800 interface on the drive was faulty. Well, after several trials and having my system crash on me numerous times I requested a replacement from the place I bought this product and they were more than willing to help me out.
I received my second drive After going thru this for the second time with a new drive and new install, I was able to get the thing to stabilize and not crash my system using firewire 400. Firewire 800 connection is still non-existent. The one touch manager & the retrospect program is still incredibly slow and the useless, retrospect program is still not functioning correctly (I have access to the one touch manager, but when I try to establish the setting for retrospect it either makes my processor cycle for 30 minutes (all the while me thinks the dumb program is analyzing my drives to prepare it for backup- dumb me the software is just using up 100% of my processor so I can’t run anything else) or it never initiates and is stuck in the please wait mode. I suppose I can drag my files over to the drive and have it save my files manually, but what’s the use of paying $800 for a drive that is supposed to backup at the touch of a button? In summary, the drive is slow, the software is poor and the one touch button doesn’t program easily with windows xp.
I have no idea if anyone else is having the same sort of problems, but I tried doing research before buying this product, but I had no luck finding user opinions; I had to rely on the professional reviews and they are never as helpful. Theoretical reviews do me no good! Thus, I hope this review helps someone else out when they are looking for a back up drive.
Update: After muddling around with this external for about 1 week, I’ve figured out a compromise to my problems-Don’t use retrospect and use a 3rd party software, smart sync. It works just great!!! The drive is stable now, it is still not up to the speeds of Firewire 800, but I did manage to get it working with the Firewire 400.

I bought two drives. One for backup of course. Sic weeks ago the main drive fails. No problem! I have a backup. Got an RMA and new refurbished unit.

Two nights ago The rplacement fails again. I'm getting very frustrated. I have a backup though. After calling to get another rma I check the backup just to be safe.

Guess what? The diagnostic tool tells me my backup is failing!

Stay away from these!