Customer Reviews

Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 750 GB USB 2.0/FireWire 400 Desktop External Hard Drive STM307504OTA3E5-RK

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

I have had a 300G "One Touch" drive for a couple of years now. It still functions acceptably.

I recently bought this current 750G Maxtor drive that I use primarily for backing up mp3 files (music) and photos. The price and capacity were right. I thought the most recent version of software would show some improvements. You see--the last version of the One Touch back up software, and now, this most recent version does not "save my life"--as it says it will on the label of the box.

IF this software "saved my life" (that is, back up ALL files on my hard drive as I specify) then it would do the simplest of functions--specifically the back up of all the files associated with mp3 files in a folder. You see, the jpg album art and folder images are part of the mp3 files. Without those images, folders lose their thumbnail identifiers. Without those images, moving files back and forth between drives and any other player program, whether it be iTunes, Windows Media Player, or to an ipod, those images are lost FOREVER. OK, maybe "forever" is not quite right, but if you have 10,000-20,000 songs on your ipod and on your hard drive, it is very time consuming to go out and grab those image files again.

So much for saving a life or even an image associated intimately with another file or folder. The problem, noted on the Seagate/Maxtor site and by other reviewers here, is that the software will NOT copy "hidden" files (even if they are unhidden in the folder). In fact this the list of files not automatically backed up...
* Operating System files that are in use
* Hidden/System Files & Folders - this includes Microsoft Outlook Data & Personal Files (e.g., *.PAB and/or *.PST files)
* Microsoft Compressed Folders
* Microsoft Encrypted Folders
* Offline Files
So you can forget about using the OneTouch software for backing up your music library (at least with the image files attached) OR your Outlook email/contacts folder (*.pst). I also noted the software was not copying zip files (compressed?) or even some Acrobat files (huh?). Oh, you CAN copy these files manually by dragging them from one location to another... but when you have a couple thousand mp3 files, that is pretty tedious!

Supposedly, SafetyDrill --another program from Seagate-- will copy these types of files, but since it was not provided in the box...there was no way to test it.

I just did not understand. So I persisted... I tried any number of methods to create a back door so I could possibly "save my life" and could not get anything to save those (un)hidden image files. I played with my file folders thinking that it was just the fact that the files are "hidden"... so I unhid them in both folders on my computer and the One Touch folders. No luck.

So with a functioning drive, that I WANT to use... I finally just dumped the software and am using a program called "filesync", available with a quick search on the web. (and well worth the $15 requested).

Why would Seagate provide such a disabled "save your life" program to customers who expect to be able to use the software for something as simple as backing up their ipods?

Would I recommend this drive to someone? Certainly not to a beginning computer user. I might if the experienced purchaser knew up front that THE MOST COMMON USE (back up of music files with image files in the same folder) is severely lacking using the Maxtor software... AND they would need to purchase another back-up program to do things properly. This lack of functionality is disappointing, especially when the Seagate/Maxtor site is loaded with commentary going back over a year about the same lack of functionality. Makes you wonder if they will listen when more serious problems might occur.

I purchased this product and backed up my entire hard drive. My computer crashed so I took it to the Mac Store. They put it a new hard drive and I was excited to load up my new drive from my external hard drive. This product was only 2 weeks old and it failed. I tried to get the Maxtor to help me and they immediately wanted me to pay $700-2000 for them to retrieve my data. I called back again and was given different information about a tech who would help me between certain hours. The tech would call at a specific time and walk me through the process and if that failed I could turn to "Michelle" in customer service who would solve my problems. The tech never called. I cannot reach Michelle. I was thrown back in customer service hell and left on hold for 40 minutes before being disconnected. No one at the company will help. I hired a Mac specialist to come to my home and try to fix the problem, but he was unable to detect the drive.

Total frustration. Everything is lost. I have called Maxtor 6 times already, and I'll be back at it on Monday. They do not have evening or weekend customer reps - so hope you do not have a job so that you will have the time to commit yourself fulltime Monday- Friday to dealing with this miserable company.

Much better drive than the failed 500GB Western Digital My Book drive I replaced with this Maxtor. Dual USB/Firewire interfaces, 750GB capacity and five year warranty are real pluses. Bundled backup software installs easily from drive itself but software functionality and feature set is fair at best compared to commercial packages like Symantec's Backup Exec System Recovery. While not a major consideration for me, this drive looks really cool. This drive does not have a power off/on switch so look elsewhere if that's a requirement for you (I leave my external drives powered on 24/7). This is my 5th Maxtor external drive and all have been better that numerous other brands and generics I have tried. Each Maxtor external drive generation seems to get better than its predecessor. I hope Seagate's purchase of Maxtor doesn't screw up their product line. Highly recommended if the bundled software isn't a major reason for your purchase.

I bought two of these drives because the hard drive on my iMac G5 was getting full thanks to my ever-expanding iTunes and iPhoto libraries. I chose the Maxtor One Touch 4 Plus 750GB because it had a nice design and dual FireWire 400 ports (more Mac friendly and allows you to daisy chain two or more drives).

Set up and connection of the drives was a breeze and it didn't take long to move some data onto these drives to give my iMac hard drive a bit of much needed breathing space. Since this was not a RAID set up, I manually duplicated the data from one drive to the other. This was not too inconvenient and seemed to work well. I also felt good that I the data was duplicated.

A couple of months into owning the drives, I unplugged one of the drives from the power source (after unmounting it) and reconnected it elsewhere only to find that it did not power back up (these drives do not have an on/off switch which I consider to be a design flaw). Thinking it may be the transformer, I unmounted the second One Touch 4 Plus drive and plugged the power adaptor from that drive into the one which had just failed - it was still dead. I then reconnected power to the second drive only to find the power indicator light flickering faintly end eventually extinguishing. Both drives were dead and it appeared, on the face of things, to be a power supply related issue.

Being based in Hong Kong, I took the drives back to the distributor who did some basic diagnostics on the drives. Basically they confirmed both were DOA. One of the drives even started emitting black smoke when it was connected and the technician confirmed the printed circuit board was fried. They offered replacements but no data recovery services and suggested that I try Seagate Data Recovery Services. What followed is a separate story but suffice to say, the sales team at Seagate Recovery have a very hard sell approach to their service. I guess they know that people are desperate because they are either a consumer user who has lost precious photos and movies or a business user who has important data they need back. I was about to succumb out of a lack of options by sending my drives to Seagate for data recovery at an estimate price of US$1500 per drive! Sounds mercenary and it is but they know they have a captive audience.

Long story short, by some miracle I managed to piece my lost data together from alternative sources so did not have to go through with the data recovery exercise. Thanks to the 5 year warranty, my dead drives have been replaced by new ones and I am using them but not to store vital data since I feel like they could fail any moment.

Given my the bad experience I had with these drives, I would not recommend them to anyone and judging by the other negative reviews, there are some inherent design issues with this drive which need to be reviewed.

The good:
The read and write speed is good enough for backups and media storage, and it offers USB and FireWire connections.
Ample space.
Quiet enough and small enough -- though not small enough to carry in a laptop bag.
The software has a nice interface. The software is basic, but I don't complain about that because it did not cost me extra.
The software does support encryption, which you can use to store personal data.

The bad:
Bad customer service by e-mail. I made one request of them, and got a cryptic response that did not answer my question. You had better not need it.
The included rescue CD will not boot on my Gateway PC. It hangs before presenting me with a user interface. This is strange because my PC can boot Knoppix just fine, and the rescue CD is based on Knoppix.
This product's Windows driver does not support standby. When coming out of standby, the PC just freezes and must be power cycled. Without the drive connected, standby works fine.
The Firewire interface is flaky. Sometimes it just stops working. A western digital product that I have works solidly via Firewire.

I bought it in June of 2008. This drive seemed like the right one; capacity, price, etc until I put my valuable data (Financial, Pictures & Music) inside. I can't get it out! Tech support has tried to help me, without success. Their final suggestion is for me to ship the drive to them?! Again, I have valuable info inside and that's not gonna happen! Very frustrated!

When I first got this I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. It worked great right out of the box! After a month I began to trust it...and was a little lazy about backing up, I admit. Then it crashed. It will be a pain to put all the data back it...But hey, I'm under warranty - of course, data recovery isn't part of the warranty - and cost 1,700! OMG. A great idea. But if you can't trust your hard drive, what good is it?

Like others, I thought this was great when used to back up my Mac via Time Machine. Until it failed suddenly and completely after three months of use. No warning, in fact a disk check worked fine earlier in the week, and it's a journaled drive. What good is a backup that fails suddenly without warning when you need it? I'm sure I'll get the drive replaced under warranty, but I won't trust it ever again and immediately purchased another brand back up drive.

I wanted a bare machine restore solution and I did get it to work for that, but I think the one touch backup is misleading as it doesn't backup hidden or system files in its normal backup mode. It does when you do a complete disk image backup, but you would not normally do this daily. The first time I tried to do a full backup it crashed my vista pc. After reading some articles on there support site I did get it to work. Also several support articles advised that you download an older free disk restore program from their web site as it works better than what comes with this disk. I would not recommend this product.

This drive works really well for me. It is fast and reasonably quiet (although not as quiet as the smaller 2.5" portable HD's). I have it attached to my iMac via Firewire and use it for video storage for my eyeTV DVR application as well as for nightly data backups. I have no video quality issues watching video from or recording video to this drive, which says something good about its performance.

The Mac backup application that comes with it is very good too. It is extremely easy to use and very intuitive. It even supports encrypting its backups.

I recommend this drive.