Reviews

posted on 02 May 2008 11:46

This small 160GB drive from Maxtor is a small form factor, one-touch external drive for Windows and Mac PCs and notebooks. It comes as a drive, a cable set and mini-CD plus basic installation booklet. The Mac experience was not positive.

The cable set has a small drive connector and two full-size USB connectors: one labelled 'power and data' and the other 'power'. The order in which you plug these in is said to be important. Why? It's just an external USB disk drive after all.

I connected up the drive and the MacBook, running Mac OS X Leopard, detected it with icons appearing on the desktop. The drive came formatted for Windows and a screen window appeared with icons in it, one with a prominent blue arrow on it. Clicking that resulted in the drive being formatted for the Mac. The Mac had to be restarted.

Upon restart the screen showed a OneTouch 4 Mini Icon and a Mini Manager icon. Clicking the latter opened up a tabbed Window set to a Simple Backup schedule tab, which I confirmed; every day at 22.00 hours. Choosing the drive icon tab at the top left of the window resulted in a new tab appearing which was empty. It was supposed to show an icon for the newly-connected drive, but it didn't.

The Manager app did not recognise that the Mac had a OneTouch 4 Mini connected to it, even though Leopard had just run through the installation procedure using software on the drive itself. How silly is that!

I went to the drive icon on the desktop and clicked on that. The drive contained a maual folder and inside that was an English-language user guide for Mac users. So, although the Manager app supplied with the drive couldn't recognise that the drive was present I could get a manual off the drive and open it, Leopard being cleverer than Maxtor's Manager app.

The manual said it could take up to two minutes for the Manager app to recognise that the drive was present. Several minutes passed and it didn't. What to do if it wasn't recognised? Check that the cables had been plugged in in the right sequence. So I disconnected them and reconnected them in that sequence and waited again. No joy.

The manual said next to check that the drive was present in the Mac's System Profiler utility. It wasn't. There was no other help in the manual. I could ring Maxtor support but, really, life's too short. I plugged in the previous external drive, Time Machine recognised it and immediately backed up all the changed data on my Mac.

Why should we bother with an external drive with its own backup software for the Mac whenTime Machine does it better, more simply, and with no nonsense about a Manager app that needs to recognise the drive but can't even though I'm happily accessing manuals on the drive it can't recognise? This manager application is just ....... words fail me.

I'm sure it works better on Windows.

Apart from the drive software not working and the drive having an apparent excess of cables, the drive itself is a bland-looking thing with a plain aluminium top embossed with the Maxtor logo, a black surround and shock-absorbent base. It weights about 6oz and is the size of a large cigarette pack, easily fitting into a jacket pocket. The button on the front looks like a light cover - it is that too - and sets off a backup sesssion if you click it. It's competent enough but ordinary looking.

You're supposed to be able, with its Safety Drill software to be able to boot and recover your PC main drive's entire contents if the main drive crashes or gets virus infected. That's not available for the Mac user though. You're also supposed to be able to use it to synch files between two PCs.

All-in-all, Time Machine with an ordinary USB or FireWire-connected hard drive is much better. In fact I could junk the Manager application altogether and just use the OneTouch 4 Mini as a Time Machine backup target, but, at any thing other than its 250GB maximum capacity it's not big enough.

On balance this drive is not a good fit to the Mac environment. If you want a Time Machine target get a larger capacity drive and don't bother with any additional software. Consider it for Windows instead, where the Safety Drill software looks to be a great idea.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}