Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.)

Dead on arrival. There is no on/off switch. You connect/disconnect the power cord for on/off. Maybe I just got a bad unit. I opted for a refund so I can't tell you how a working one performs.

I was excited to have the extra capacity but frustrated at the lack of an on/off switch. I really think that is a problem they need to address.... The drive seemed to work fine for a few days, then made a series of loud grinding noises and died. I don't know for a fact but I suspect the lack of an on / off switch had a part in the ultimate failure of the drive. Also, it would have been helpful if the CD that came with it had some software to reformat or otherwise try to diagnose and repair.

This drive is quite nice for file storage, with nice
performance, but could use few improvements. It lacks the On/Off
switch, the backup software is abit lousy, could be much better.
This software does not recognize any of my secondary partitions
other than fat32/ntfs which is a big problem for me since I
dual-boot with Linux. It has some issues with via usb chipsets
under linux that need to be hand-tweaked in order for this drive
to work under linux.

I have had THREE of these units go bad on me in succession. I purchased a new unit, and had it replaced twice, and all three of them died in a similar fashion. I believe the heat gets too high in these (there is no built in fan), and eventually the drives give out. I had them replaced under warranty each time, but losing your data is NOT fun especially if you don't have a backup.

I would highly recommend you look elsewhere. Maxtor could not have created a worse product. Three NEW drives going bad in succession has to tell you something about the quality!

I'm well versed in HD technology, and I tried to recover the data each time by using the drives internally after removing them from the enclosure. It was clear the drives themselves were the problem each time because of the noises they would make (tell tale clicking sounds).

Buyer beware.

Fast and awsome. Great for storage. (For the guy below.. If you set up your BIOS correctly it wont try and boot to the drive... duh!)

Dead on arrival. There is no on/off switch. You connect/disconnect the power cord for on/off. Maybe I just got a bad unit. I opted for a refund so I can't tell you how a working one performs.

its a good drive if you dont mind disconnecting it every time you boot up the computer or reboot otherwise if its connected - the system will keep rebooting until you unplug it