Customer Reviews

Maxtor One Touch II 200 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive (E01E200)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Had it for a few days now and it seems to work fine.

A few quirks setting up : when connected to a USB port on the front panel of my PC, the device isn't recognized - it HAS to be connected to one of the back ports (the ones that are directly on you motherboard). Since I have no problems whatsoever connecting other USB devices (camera/memory stick) to the ports at the front panel, I find this quite odd. I would recommend getting the USB/Firewire combo version of this drive for a few $ more, to avoid any possible USB conflicts...

There are two install options : 1) basic (drivers+utility) or 2) basic + the bundled, slimmed down Retrospect software by Dantz - I wouldn't rely on it for critical 'full system' backups since it's awkward, limited software. If you don't buy the Maxtor One Touch II just for the sake of having an external, large capacity drive to which you can drag the files/folders of your choice, but are serious about backing up your complete system and ALL the data on it, use the drive with Acronis' "True Image" software - at $ 50 it's the best choice for imaging software; it works out of the box - unlike the bundled Retrospect software which also requires you download/install the Microsoft .NET framework application.
And besides disk images created with True Image, you can of course drag any file/folder onto the Maxtor for easy/fast access, meaning you can have the best of both worlds. Just a thought.

The Maxtor utility allows you to optionally protect the entire drive's contents with a password - without it the drive cannot be accessed. A good feature if you need it, like when taking the drive with you somewhere - or even losing it somehow.

Hardware : the drive is very quiet, which is a big plus (I have an old Lacie external HD that sounds like a plane taking off when powered on), it also looks/feels nice and sturdy and sits neatly on your desk in upright or flat position. The drive runs at 7200rpm and has an 8Mb cache which means you shouln't encounter any problems even when you're really straining the disk.

At the time of writing (May 2005), the product offers good value for money, both in terms of performance and "storage per buck". I think the bundled software is junk and recommend using the drive either "as is" for creating backups of your files, and/or use it with a good disc imaging program like Acronis True Image. Everyone knows you should always create more than one backup occasionally, e.g. to DVD/RW, but this way you'll have all your data and system settings ready for restoring in any scenario - from accidentally erasing/modifying files to having a serious crash / system failure.

Some of the other reviewers complained about the basic Retrospect software that comes with this drive and I have to agree that it's a pretty poor backup solution. However, I now own three of these drives and love them!

I use two at work with upgraded Multi-Server Retrospect backup software to back up three servers and 60 client computers. The backups are far faster than any tape I've ever used and it's much easier to find files when I need to restore something.

The Maxtor One Touch II that I use at home is used simply as a USB drive. I've copied over two thousand iTunes songs into a My Music folder and I've copied over three thousand digital photos of my family into a My Pictures folder and I still have over 130GB of free space.

I feel much safer having my music and photos on a drive I could grab in a hurry in case of an emergency rather than trying to find dozens of CD-R's that I've burned over the years.

I am one who likes to check customer reviews before purchasing any electronic items--camera, MP3 players, DVD players etc. I usually pay more attention to the negative comments to check for a trend of what could be wrong with the item. Based on a coworker's recommendation as well as comparison shopping, my search lead me to the customer reviews in Amazon, CNET, J&R, and New Egg. With the Maxtor One Touch II 200 GB HD there seems to be three common threads. They are as follows:

1) Over time the drive gets hot

2) You will loose your data

3) It makes noise

Well as of today, I've owned this drive for just over a month, and it has served its purpose beautifully. I only needed it as an external drive. I pretty much use it as a thumb drive that you unfortunately have to plug in. No bother.

As soon as you take it out of the box and plug it in, it works fine. I plugged it into the USB port on the front of the computer, and it just shows up as another drive on your computer. There is a collection of programs and drivers (if needed) that accompany the drive, but none of them are required to use the drive if you are using WinXP. If you would like to use the One Touch feature, you will need to install the program for that. This feature allows you to backup everything on your computer up 200GB or course. This can be done just by pushing the button on the front of the drive. Again, you only need the software if you plan to use this feature. I have yet to take the disc out of the sleeve.

One of the things I wish more people would mention in their reviews of electronic equipment is the power supply. For those of you who travel around the world, this drive comes with a dual voltage power supply rated at 100V - 240VAC. It does not come with a plug adaptor, so that may be something for you to keep in mind. Also, there is no case. The drive looks rather nice and you will want to keep it protected if you are traveling around with it.

The power cable is rather long so you won't have to worry about sitting right next to a power source. Also, the USB 2.0 cable is rather long as well. (I don't have my book with me at the moment so unfortunately I can't give you the actual measurement.) The big thing here is that you have room to work with.

As for the 3 items I've mentioned above, only one has not occurred. Yes the drive does get warm, but I would suspect all of these drives do that after a while. After about an hour and a half you'll notice that the drive is warm. It's not hot, just warm. I used it for a while in a room where the AC was set on Artic and it took a little while longer to get warm. Considering I'm currently in a rather warm climate, this is just something to note. Also, I was watching a movie from the drive. With that going, it still took about 90 minutes before getting noticeably warm. It gets warm like any other device would, but not so bad as to be concerned. I've had it on for as much as 3 hours and it was still, just warm.

The other issue is the noise. For the first month I hardly ever heard the drive spin. With all the reports about the noise, I actually thought something was wrong with mine because I didn't hear anything. Within the past week or so, I do hear a little something. It sounds like a drive working, so it's really nothing to be concerned about. Just like your computer, it will make a few sounds, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The bottom line is that this is a hard drive and I use it as such. It does a great job at what I want it to do--store music, videos, movies, documents, and photos. If you simply work it like a hard drive you should have no problems.

I have had a real problem with this drive. It crashes when trying to write a large file to it - like a back up of my PC. That's what I'd gotten it for. I previously had a Maxtor One Touch w Firewire and liked it quite a lot when it was working. When that drive died (Hmmm - not the greatest experience, actually) I picked up this One Touch II. Going by my reading on the web, there is a problem with the chips used where by the buffer inside the drive overflow (or something along those lines). Maxtor offers a program on their web site for the Fire Wire version to flash those bios but not for the USB version.
I also verified that it had this problem on another machine.

I work off a laptop so I have to use outboard storage for backup and organization of large data files. I have never written a review but had so much trouble with this device, I felt compelled to warn others. Getting to this drive was hit or miss from the begining. When it showed up as a drive, it worked well. It started not showing up and no matter how many replugs or reboots I did I could not get it to show up as a device. There is something on the Maxtor site but it referes to a hotfix with XP SP2 that I could never locate on the MS site. I spent more time trying to fix this HD than I did using it. I gave this device one star only because zero was not available.

The Retrospect software included with this drive is critical for the "OneTouch" feature, but be warned, It will crash your system. I installed everything according to specs and once the Retrospect software was embedded in my system, all I got was the BSOD (blue screen of death). If you try to uninstall the software, your system will BSOD before the uninstall completes. The only way I was able to remove this vile program was to boot into safe mode and delete the Dantz folder alltogether. Then boot normally and remove the programs through the Control Pannel.

I've had this drive for almost a year now and it has worked flawlessly on every system I have connected it to. It works well even when connected to a USB 1.1 only machine. Some people have complained of data loss with this drive--all hard drives are susceptible to data loss and corruption, especially external drives. Many people do not realize that external drives cannot be turned on or off or physically disconnected whenever you want to. You need to make sure you use the Safely Remove Hardware option to stop the USB device before powering the drive down or disconnecting it, otherwise you run a high risk of data corruption. External hard drives are great tools to use for extra storage, backup and for moving large amounts of data from one machine to another; however, you must understand that a mechanical device WILL ALWAYS fail at some point and should not be trusted as the only means of permanent data storage. It does not matter what manufacturer makes the device, they will all fail at some point. Successful data backup starts with a multi-tiered approach. External drives and indeed any fixed mechanical device is the "quick and easy" medium for storing data. Optical or tape devices should be used as a secondary medium as they are much more reliable and can be easily archived in a safe and secure location. The latter mediums are slower, harder to use and less convenient but provide an added layer of protection and have enormously longer shelf-life and reliability. As to whether the packaged backup software is any good, I do not know as I use the device as a storage drive and prefer to manually archive data on a selective basis.

I have purchased 2 of these products recently and both have failed within 2 months. Sure Amazon and Maxtor have replaced the units but I have had to pay the shipping and have had the trouble to be without them for several weeks. Cannot Maxtor do better than this? I think I will recosider before buying another Maxtor product. I guess that I just assumed that all Maxtor products were top quality but I was wrong. Please do your research better than I did.

I do a lot of home video rendering and burning on my notebook computer(60 GB HD) This new 200GB is perfect for putting all my video on a hard drive and burning it to DVD later. This hard drive is actualy faster than my notebook hard drive. I use the Maxtor as my DVD project reads from it and burns to DVD. The USB 2.0 connection is so fast the external HD acts like an internal. If you are a notebook user... you got to get one.

All-in-all: laughable. Installation was a nightmare, and there is poor support available via Maxtor's site.

Once installed, the Maxtor software will recognize the drive maybe one out of every five attempts, making drive management and the handy One Touch feature impossible / useless via Maxtor software.

Dantz software has a good reputation, but it works poorly with this drive. After performing a number of backups, I decided to test the restore capability. The softwware tells me how many restore points I have, but when I try to select a restore point, they all disappear. So I can backup, but I can't restore.

Which means that this drive is useless for what it is intended, BUT it functions great as just a plain ol' external storgae device. Forget One Touch, forget Dantz, and do it the old fashioned way. I give it two stars because it's snappy and (so far) reliable.