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Overall Rating

Great Drive - Superb Software
At our office there are LaCie and Seagate external portable hard drives that are used for back-up of files and occasionally to transfer large quantities of files. When shopping for a external back-up solution for my home PC, I wanted a portable because I dreaded the thought of having one more plug and brick coming out of battery backup power supply that sits next to the home desktop PC. What is that mess beneath the desk my wife often asks? What are all those plugs for? With separate plugs and several power bricks for a router, external speakers, cable modem, laser printer, inkjet photo printer, a fax machine and a Western Digital 80gb external drive I did not want another plug or power brick. When the Western Digital 80gb external drive started to fail I replaced it and its power brick with the Maxtor 250gb One Touch 4 Mini. The change was a huge improvement. The Maxtor is less than 1/3 of the size and weight of the WD it replaced and it holds three times the data. Unlike the WD drive the Maxtor receives power from the USB port. The Maxtor has no power plug and no power brick.

What really sets this drive apart from the WD, Lacie, and Seagate drives I have used is the software. Some drives just allow you to back-up your data. While data back-up is essential to preserve ones digital pictures, music collection, and personal documents, if your internal hard drive crashes, data backup will not restore your operating system or applications. The One touch Mini, comes with Maxtor “Safety Drill” software that allows the user to image the entire drive, including the operating system (windows) and all applications. If the hard drive crashes, the user boots their PC with a supplied emergency CD, and then restores their whole PC from the drive image stored on the external drive. The last time a drive failed in the office, a technician charged us for half a days work to install a new drive, re-install windows, and reload various applications. With a drive image hopefully this will not be necessary. The back-up software included with the Maxtor is better than anything I have ever seen bundled with a drive. It is easy to use and it is robust. It can perform scheduled backups in the background. The Software is for the most part PC only. As such Mac users will not be better off with the Maxtor than with the excellent LaCie portables. For Windows users the bundled software makes the One Touch 4 Mini a better choice than competing options from WD, LaCie, Iomega and others.