Customer Reviews

Maxtor STM310004OTA3E5-RK OneTouch 4 Plus 1 TB 3.5" USB 2.0/FireWire400 External Hard Drive

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

Several things I like about this drive: It is one solid terabyte, not several smaller drives inside of a single enclosure like many others (2 x 500GB). The 7200 RPM speed of the drive means it is fast. I can play music off of it through iTunes while it backs up my computer with no change in performance. Maxtor is now owned by Seagate which is known for manufacturing better hard drives than those made by Maxtor in its earlier days. The drive is basically silent and has a nice modern appearance (I have seen some pictures of an all black version that looks pretty tough). The price is very reasonable compared to other 1TB drives. Overall I am very happy with my purchase and I am considering getting a second one so I can have one dedicated to backup and the other for storage of music and photos.

I purchased this hard drive when upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to use with "Time Machine." Time Machine is a computer backup service built into the new Apple Macintosh operating system, which quietly backs up any changes on your computer hard drive every hour. The Maxtor One Touch 4 Plus 1 TB hard drive comes formatted for Windows and includes several hundred megabytes of software pre-installed for backing up your computer at the press of the lighted button on the front of the drive. The instructions tell Mac users to use the included CD to reformat the drive and install Maxtor's backup software for Macintosh. Since I planed to use the backup software built into Leopard, I never inserted the CD. I simply connected the drive to my computer via the hard drives single USB 2.0 mini port (it also has two firewire 400 ports) and my computer instantly recognized the drive. I used Disk Utility in the utilities folder to reformat the drive for Macintosh, removing all the Windows software, and I was good to go. Highly recommended.

I was shopping for a large USB drive to serve as a backup device for my videos, music, system files, etc, and ran across this. I liked the looks of this maxtor drive as the external casing was fairly sturdy. In addition, it had some "maxtor backup" software included on the hard drive (which I figured I could use), and so I picked it up.

Overall, I'm satisfied with the hardware. It's quiet, runs cool, and so far as been reliable (a couple months). The reason I'm knocking off a couple of stars is the software that comes with it (and I was depending on). Here's a list of shortcommings and minor problems I had with the backup software:

* The backup software does not save hidden files. If there is a hidden file or directory, it will be entirely skipped. I wish this was specified as a limitation on the box as I might have reconsidered my purchase.

* The backup software only allows the backup of disks directly attached to the computer, and not network attached storage. Again, I wish this was specified on the box.

* The scheduling of the backup is very limited. I could only figure a way to schedule 1 backup. I would have preferred to backup some stuff nightly, others weekly.

* There is a pretty cool disk imaging feature which allows you to directly image your boot drive to the maxtor. In case of catastrophic failure, you can boot via cdrom, and restore from the maxtor to your boot drive. Unfortunately, the file created on the maxtor is severely fragmented. And running defrag on the disk resulted in the system hanging for hours as it attempted to defrag the extremely large file that was out there (120 gigabytes). I ended up having to power cycle the machine to kill this process. I attempted this a few times with the same results.

I ended up uninstalling all of the maxtor management software, and reformatting the disk and going with a 3rd party backup package. That seems to be working well.

I have 2 suggestions for the next revision of this drive:

1) The drive "sleeps" after a while of no access. When it is accessed, it takes a while (15 secs?) to spin up. I wish there were a way to turn this off.

2) There is one multi-functional access light. If the light is fading in and out the drive is sleeping. If the drive light is blinking, it's being accessed. If it's solid, the disk is spun up and not being accessed. I would prefer to have separate indicator light for each state. Very minor nit here.

In summary, a solid drive. Just don't count on using the backup software included.

I got this drive new and tried reformatting for a Mac (extended journaled). The drive failed to take the formatting and it would no longer mount. I tried DiskWarrior to see if I could resurrect it. No luck. I'm gonna return it and try another. I've had excellent luck with all my other Maxtor drives, so I suspect that this one was just a bad drive.

**Update**
This drive must be formatted for the Mac in a unique way: In DiskUtility, you have to first format for MS-DOS (FAT), then partition the drive for Mac formatting (Extended Journaled, or whatever you choose). In addition to that, you must also chose Apple Partition Map in the options tab. This is the solution to the problem that I and others have had with this drive.

Maxtor should be more clear on this issue as it is the only drive that I've had to format in this way in over 20 years of working on a Macintosh.

I do a lot of work with video and audio files, meaning I often have to move many very large files around and keep them in accessible areas. I had a Seagate 300gb external hard drive to help with this, but I maxed that out. I then went out and got this Maxtor 1 terabyte drive to help me gain some more disk space easily.

My other external drive is a Seagate and it worked flawlessly and quietly - it had not occurred to me that this new Maxtor would do any differently. However, right from the start I ran into problems. Every time my computer "slept" the Maxtor drive would disconnect. When I woke my PC back up, I would literally have to unplug and replug the Maxtor drive in before it would be recognized again.

The drive can get VERY loud, to the point that it's quite annoying. Yes, I realize it's a full terabyte but to be honest I'd much rather have a few smaller drives that are quiet, vs having this constant HUMMMMMMMM in my work area.

Also, just having the Maxtor connected to my PC causes all sorts of problems. If I am in Word (or really any other application) and go to save or open a file, it will sit there whirring the external drive even though I am loading and saving from the C or D drive! It's not even "using" the Maxtor but it feels a need to power it up before it gives me my drive options. It wouldn't be bad if this was a five second operation - but sometimes I have to wait for a full, long 30 seconds to 1 minute before I get my save dialogue to wake up again. I know one minute sounds like a short period of time but when you're trying to make a quick change and go on to something else, to wait for a full minute while a not-even-being-used drive thrashes around can get quite frustrating.

The Maxtor website and forums aren't much help either. I did try to use them and really just poking around in the control panel with various sleep and power settings is what I had to do to get this even slightly functional.

I really do appreciate having the space. Having a terabyte of storage online is quite nice. But in terms of THIS drive, I wouldn't recommend it to others.

I am a tech that has been working with maxtor drives for 10+ years and never had a problem with any of them. This is my first ext. maxtor drive though. I recommend that you use firewire, it is a lot faster then usb2.0. The transfer rate will let you play movies, music, etc. right off the drive.

I have always used maxtor products and this has been my favorite one. Its one hard drive and not a double which is a plus. Also really fast seek time. Sturdy case. Will buy more maxtor products for sure.

Easy to set up and easy to use. There were a bunch of files on the disk that seem to be there to install the hard drive software, but you dont need to install that software unless you want to use the Maxtor backup system. They take up 200MB and I left them on my disk, but I suspect they can be deleted.

This is my first large external drive but I can't imagine anything else I'd need on one. I have had absolutely no problems with it and the Maxtor Manager program that comes with it has a customizable backup as well as password protection and file encryption to files that you choose. I have many movies on it and as long as your using the firewire cable you can play a very high quality movie with virtually no choppiness in the picture or sound, even the USB cable does very well with movies.

Had this drive for about six months no and it hasn't given me any issues. The reason I've only given it 2 out of 5 stars is because it's annoying! The thing sleeps constantly unless you are accessing the drive constantly it will shutdown. Example: Working on a clip in a Final Cut Pro time line for more than a couple of minutes. Since you've accessed the clip and have it up it's stored into the memory and doesn't need to access the drive to open it over and over again. The Maxtor drive sees this and says "since I have no files to open or change I'm just gonna take a nap". GRRRRRR! When you do want to make a change to the clip or move to the next one you have to wake this thing up to access the file. BRRRROOOONNNNN!!! It's loud! And takes a good 10 seconds to get up! A lazy drive! I tried finding a fix on the Maxtor support pages but there is none. You have to write a script in OSX to counter the Maxtor one which is beyond my level of expertise. This drive is like a deadbeat cousin don't bother.

I do a lot of live music recording and recently decided to get an external drive for out of town work with a partner. I had an old Maxtor drive that lasted for years and years, and made the mistake of buying one of these off the shelf based on previous experience because I was in a rush.

Big mistake. Read the reviews and don't make the same mistake.

The drive worked fine for about 2 months. Then it started to die over a period of a couple of days. The drive disconnects frequently and the partitions get corrupted.

If you are lucky, and/or have some technical aptitude you may be able to recover at least some of your data, luckily I had reformatted mine into 3 partitions and got most of my data back. Otherwise you will pay a fortune to just try to recover your data.

Also, unless you bought the drive at a store and it dies within the period of time the store itself will take it back, you are stuck with Seagate. The limited warranty for such an unreliable drive is pretty much the shaft too.

You cannot get your money back (what they should give you for this piece of junk) and you don't even get a new replacement. Instead you get the same piece of crap back, only it will be someone else's drive which also died, refurbished.

Bottom line, bad purchase decision.