OT: How are the Maxtor OneTouch 500 MB drives

will-3 wrote on 5/22/2008, 6:23 AM

I wonder what you guys think of the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus external hard dirves...

We needed more external storage and Office Depot had the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 500 MB external hard disk for $99... so we bought two late yesterday.

We are not using them for backup... but to store project files while we edit/work on them.

We have them connected to the production PC via USB 2.0 right now but will probably switch that to firewire since they have firewire ports.

They are 7200 RPM drives with 16 MB of buffer according to the spec.

Thanks for any comments.

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 5/22/2008, 8:07 AM

I had one Maxtor III that crapped out (300 gig) permanently so I through in another older drive in the case which worked fine. Make sure you have a cooling fan inside.
JJK

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 5/22/2008, 10:59 PM

Hi,

My Maxtor OneTouch III 500G died after 18 moths of very moderate use. It was replaced (by warranty) with an 1,5GBtye OneTouch. This has been now in use for 6 months. Knock wood...

Keep your HD's cool, dont place them on top of eacth other, neither put them in a cabinet with limited airfolw. Many peple do that to get rid of the cooling fan noise...

Christian

ritsmer wrote on 5/22/2008, 11:30 PM

Bought one 500 GB over 2 years ago. It stands in the other end of the house and is connected to the house-cable net.
Has been working faithfully doing a backup from my server and the other house computers every night since.
Never had any problems.

ECB wrote on 5/23/2008, 5:35 AM

I picked up a 500G One Touch. Maxtor's are the only drives I have that failed but the One Touch has a 5 year warrenty and with Seagate now owning Maxtor, I felt the risk was minimal.

Ed B

video777 wrote on 5/23/2008, 11:48 PM

I wouldn't touch a Maxtor!!! They are by far one of the worst drives on the market.

P.S. I know there are at least three people who will say they are the greatest ever and have never failed. All I can say is that's not been my experience, or most other's experience (based on the statistics of how often they fail). I highly recommend staying away from Maxtor. My favorite is Western Digital and have had good luck with recent models of Seagate (there was a time when they had some issues).

UlfLaursen wrote on 5/24/2008, 1:20 AM

I think WD is having good deals on their external drives - at least here in Denmark - they have 2 or 3 different models available and I think 500 GB is a good size when you compare $ pr. GB.

I think cooling is a main thing here. I have somel Maxtors that are ok - have one that died on me (because of too litle cooling I guess) but also had 2 WD's die on me - probably of the same reason. I mainly use Seagate now, and have WD server SATA edition disks in my NAS server from netgear.

/Ulf

JJKizak wrote on 5/24/2008, 5:28 AM

The first two Western Digital drives I had failed (IDE). I also had several Seagates (IDE/SCSI) that failed, I had two IBM's SCSI's that failed. I had one Medea SCSI that failed. I have not had any SATA's (Maxtor) that failed. I have not had any Fuji SCSi's that failed.
JJK

ChristoC wrote on 5/24/2008, 5:55 AM

Out of many hundreds of drives I've used over the years, I've found the failure rate is around 3%. Thing about Hard Drives is that they will all fail eventually; it's just a matter of time. Personally I found WD drives the most reliable at the moment; failure rate for these has been around 1%.

Always buy the slightly more expensive models with 3-5 year warranty, never the ones with just 1 year warranty - it's reasonable to assume that a model with a longer warranty is the one the manufacturer expects to last the longest.
E.g. have a look at the tables at http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp - there is a vast difference in warranty time for WD models.

Retail outlets do not necessarily stock the good models - sometimes you have to ask for the good models to be ordered in, or order on the internet from specialist suppliers.

Never trust your valuable work to one drive - always have at least one backup, and keep it up to date, hourly if necessary.