Maxtor Personal Storage 5000XT - Hard drive - 250 GB - external - FireWire / Hi-Speed USB - 5400 rpm - buffer: 2 MB

by Maxtor

Product Details

Product Manual [1.25mb PDF]

• Item Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 pounds
• ASIN: B00007B8UP
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 7, 2006

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The Maxtor external hard drive makes it easy to add fast storage specially designed for your unique creative requirements. With a storage capacity of 250 GB, you'll have plenty of workspace for all your large projects, including space for more than 15 hours of digital video. This Maxtor 5,400 RPM hot-swappable hard drive features FireWire and USB 2.0 interface ports, giving you one of the most versatile drives available for your Mac and PC.

In addition, you can easily back up your system using the Maxtor OneTouch system. Make backup copies of your files, while you work, with a simple push of a button. You can also run automated, unattended backups with Dantz Retrospect Express software, included with the drive. The compact drive design lets you set it vertically or horizontally.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad Quality Control, July 22, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Maxtor Personal Storage 5000XT - Hard drive - 250 GB - external - FireWire / Hi-Speed USB - 5400 rpm - buffer: 2 MB (Personal Computers)

Do not buy this drive.
Our company bought about 12 of these, as an economical large-storage and backup solution. 3 have already failed within 2 months, and I am having to think up other backup solutions in anticipation of the next one. The failure mode is very similar to what some of the other reviews have said on this site and others (try PCWorld too) - the platter starts making some racket and the thing just quits. Maxtor is a reputable enough company to honor their warranties, but it's not worth the hassle and potential data loss.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review from a Macintosh User, May 16, 2003

By 

Shelley Gammon "Geek" (Kaufman, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Maxtor Personal Storage 5000XT - Hard drive - 250 GB - external - FireWire / Hi-Speed USB - 5400 rpm - buffer: 2 MB (Personal Computers)

I ordered one of these for work after one of the dual harddrives in my G4 died. You don't want to be in the position of buying a backup device AFTER you've already had a hardware failure. I have finally learned my lesson.

If you do not have a backup system, you are only postponing the inevitable - hard drives do and will fail at one time or another.

That being said, this Maxtor drive does the trick!

The one-touch button is deceiving to a point. If you only have one partition and/or only one drive to backup, then you can use the one-touch.

If you are backing up multiple drives and/or partitions, you should probably partition the Maxtor drive accordingly, which disables the one-touch backup feature.

For the Mac, Maxtor includes Retrospect Express backup software. The intuitive controls let you schedule back ups - deciding which Maxtor partition will back up which partition(s)/drive(s) on your Mac, and at what time and date these backups will occur.

You can multifunction while the backups are taking place - I can have Photoshop, Illustrator and Internet Explorer open... surf, create images, etc. and the backup continues in the background.

Detailed error reports let you know if you're trying to back up more info than you've allocated space for.

This 250GB drive has a remarkably small desktop footprint - I have it resting on top of 2 Lacie 60GB drives - each one of the Lacie 60GB drives is about 50% thicker and 50% wider than this 250GB powerhouse.

The drive has elegant curved feet that keep it a few millimeters off the surface of your desk (or other peripherals), and the feet are shaped to enable multiple drives to be stacked on top of each other so that the feet fit in a scalloped groove on the top of another Maxtor drive.

Goood design, nice to look at, and most importantly - reliable and easy to use.

Obviously, you can use this as additional storage - but whatever you do - you need at least one to perform backups!

I am using this with a dual 800mhz "QuickSilver" Mac G4, running OS X. I do no know how well the backups run using slower machines (especially running in the background) or using an older OS. What I can say is that I am pleased with the results - and it's a great bang for the buck.

20 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Oodles of storage!, December 24, 2002

By 

Walter Reade (Appleton, WI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Maxtor Personal Storage 5000XT - Hard drive - 250 GB - external - FireWire / Hi-Speed USB - 5400 rpm - buffer: 2 MB (Personal Computers)

Unlike the good old days, today's rapid increase in hard disk storage space make it darn near impossible to fill my computer drive up to capacity. I take thousands of high-resolution digital pictures, have ripped every CD I own, and digitize old VHS video. But with products like Maxtor's 5000xt, I just can't keep up. The 5000xt provides a jaw dropping 250 GB of external drive storage at 5400 rpm. It connects to your PC using either USB (1.1 or 2.0) or FireWire. What makes this drive more than just a behemoth of storage is its capacity for push-button back-ups. You push a button on the drive unit and it backs up any changes you have made since your last backup. For me, this seems very convenient. (Of course, you can schedule automatic backups.)