usb drives

I have been using Maxtor external hard drives for just over a year now and have made recommendations to family and colleagues which have resulted in them buying many of them as well. So with experience with close to a dozen hard drives, we have not had any problems and have nothing but praise for the drives.

First off, with internal hard drive prices for laptops so expensive and so difficult to install, external hard drives that use firewire (IEEE1394) are a great option. These hard drives use both firewire and USB, so you can take the information and hot swap it among multiple computer (like a thumb drive) or keep it plugged in to a single computer for use a secondary hard drive. I have found virtually no speed difference between accessing files on the external hard drive versus the internal.

The automatic backup feature, makes the hard drive all that much more useful. It comes bundled with Dantz Retrospect Express program which is an easy-to-use option for automatically backing up just what you want with a touch of a button. I backup often, usually just punching the button as I go meet to clients. It usually finishes the automated process by the time I return. Because backing up is so easy to do, when I did lose the hard drive on one of my laptops, I barely missed a beat after I got it replaced, simply restoring the drive image to make my new laptop look just like my old one.

I highly recommend Maxtor external hard drives.

This is a regular issue external hard disk. I acquired it four months ago and have had no mechanical problems with it.

One thing that struck me as odd was the drive came pre-formated with one 37 gigabyte FAT32 partition. That may be handy for older versions of windows that don't support NTFS. There is a couple of gigabytes in unpartitioned space on the drive. I would suggest most user's repartition the drive and install a more capable filesystem.

If you are not planning to frequently disconnect the drive I would also suggest that you travel to the windows control panel and enable write caching. After doing this you need to use the safely remove hardware option to remove it properly. Doing this speeds up write performance for the drive somewhat. I have only tried this under windows xp home and it works fine.

Even though this is a USB 2.0 device if you have a older computer with USB 1.1 this drive is a great deal for you. It works perfectly with USB 1.1. It will seem slow as that particular interface isnt the fastest thing ever. But the drive is still a easy way to transfer large amounts of data between machines or to perform data backup.

My machine dual boots mandrake linux 9.2. The drive was recognized and automatically configured during the linux install routine for this version of linux.

The box it came in included a driver disk and all the needed cables and the external power supply. A tiny manual was also included.

In my opinion this is a very affordable product that performs well. The drives only serious negative is that it lacks a power switch of any kind.

First of all, I rank this item high, because of it's affordability. Usually it is around 100 dollars. I believe only a brand "LaCie" offer cheaper, which I do NOT recommend those items.

Anyways, to get back to this device, I need to back-up my files from the old computer, since I was getting a new computer. With USB 2.0, its speed is something to brag about.

The unit doesn't look fancy or professional at all (plastic design) but the performance is still top of the line.

Here are the minuses:
1. With the weight of this unit and the AC Adapter, forget about carrying it around. The unit is not designed for that purpose.

2. There is no on/off switch. you will have to unplug it to turn it off.

Other than those problems, what you will get is an external hard drive, nothing less nothing more.

For long~ term use, be smart and buy something more reliable. Invest more money for a fancier product.

In my case, I only use it when I need to transfer big chunk of drive to anothe. For everyday use, PLEASE buy something better.