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Product summary
CNET Editors' ChoiceMar 06
The good: The Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition hard drive is a snap to set up, offers multiple interfaces, provides backup software, and is RAID capable. It's also fast and fairly priced for the capacity and the features, which include media server capability.
The bad: The Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition's formatting utility is a bit opaque for advanced users.
The bottom line: Maxtor's OneTouch III Turbo Edition packs in a lot of features and capabilities at a fair price. Among external desktop hard drives, it's a winner.
Specifications: Compatibility: PC, Mac; Connector type: 9 pin FireWire 800; Hard drive size: 300 GB; See full specs
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 03/17/2006
- Released on: 11/09/2005
The OneTouch III family departs from Maxtor's traditional silver-box design. The OneTouch III Turbo Edition is a rectangular box (think half-size toaster), colored a bit like a reverse grayscale Oreo, with light gray sides and a dark platinum center. Measuring 6.0 inches high by 3.9 inches wide by 8.5 inches long, it follows a minimalist-styling creed, with clean lines and a single button on the front to invoke the one-touch backup from which the drive derives its name. The back is far busier, supplying a USB 2.0 port, two IEEE 1394.b (FireWire 800) ports, a FireWire 400 port, a Kensington lock port, and an on/off switch. The box's side panels protrude slightly beyond the bottom (and top) of the unit and pull double duty as feet (the drive somewhat resembles a thick, sturdy I beam). Said panels are covered with a slightly rubbery coating, which makes for a sure grip while transporting or moving the drive. Because the side panels aren't as tacky as some footpads on the bottoms of other drives, the drive is less likely to stick to the surface it's sitting on after a long stationary period or in a particularly hot environment--an appreciated design flourish.
The Maxtor Manager is a helpful utility for managing the OneTouch III Turbo Edition (RAID setup and so on), but we do have one beef. When you first install the software and the drive under Windows, you'll be asked if you want to format the drive. (The drive comes formatted for Mac OS X.) What this really means is to partition and format it--an attempt to shield the end user from complexity. That's not the gripe, however. What we didn't like was that the program offers no feedback concerning which of the two drives it intends to partition and format. This may not bother inexperienced users, but veterans would never give an application carte blanche to perform this kind of operation without some assurance that it truly knows what it's doing. We used Windows XP's Computer Management\Disk Management to do our own partition/format, which took about two hours for the terabyte drive. Though later testing proved that the black-box app worked just fine, we still prefer more transparency.
The other half of the OneTouch III's software bundle is the EMC Dantz Retrospect Express HD 1.1. This HD version is a vast improvement over the older version formerly bundled with OneTouch drives, both in terms of learning curve and usability. Coupled with the Maxtor Manager, it's as simple and sweet a backup/recovery solution as you could ask for.
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