Maxtor OneTouch External 300GB Hard Drive

Reviewed by: athrillofhope

Duration of ownership: 3 Months

Strengths: Maxtor worked for 3 months.

Weaknesses: Stopped working after 3 months.

Overall: I would never buy another Maxtor product again in my life. Pathetic. Worked perfectlly for 3 months. Then it conked out. Swapped another drive in its place with identical configuration and the new drive (actually, it was an older used drive) works without a hitch. I'm now looking at the Western Digital.

Reviewed by: JC789

Strengths: Good until it dies.

Weaknesses: Sudden failure with no indicators.

Overall: I have one Maxtor 360GB firewire One Touch that is still working but starts with a really annoying "Angry Bee" fan for a few minutes. This started with less than 3 months time. I have a 500GB One Touch Firewire 800 that failed in less than one year and now I have a 1 Terrabyte One Touch firewire 800 that has died today with less than 8 months on it. It's only now that I see many other people are reporting the same problems. The only good thing is that it was being used for a Drive Image backup, so all I lost was the money for the Maxtor and the backup files. The original files are fine but now unprotected until I buy a better drive tonight.Though my 3 drives are not identical to the one reviewed here, they all exibit the same poor quality and failure that people with the 300GB One Touch are reporting here.Burn me once, shame on Maxtor... Burn me three times, I should have my head examined!! So why is one star the lowest rating? No Zero Star?

Reviewed by: fugue

Strengths: Heavy enclosure increases utility as door stop.

Weaknesses: Failed after less than a year

Overall: I have a 300 that received very light use--just making an occasional backup copy of my internal drive. After less than a year it stopped working. I would recommend avoiding this drive at all costs.

Reviewed by: Tom Cameron

Strengths: *lol*

Weaknesses: Failure rateUnreliable performance

Overall: Having started at a new company, I was impressed to see employees' PCs having an external drive attached for backup purposes. There are about 20 or so scattered throughout, and I was very glad to know users were responsible for their data's protection. I told a friend of mine about this, and he started to laugh. Out loud even! He told me that at his (much) larger corporation they too had purchased a (larger) group of these drives. However, he reported to me that their failure rate was rather high. It was so high I didn't completely believe him. He even showed me the remnants of one such device which had completely melted a transistor on the circuit board of the drive. Still, I was wary of his results. Today, my drive killed itself. I noticed that its performance had degraded over the past few days, and it seems today was it's final act. I have lost approximately 200G of files I use on a very regular basis. I have also lost CD images for Windows installs that I had crafted over the past month to our specific requirements. When I contacted "customer support" at maxtor, the person I spoke with told me that they did not reccomend heavy usage of the drive. In fact, he suggested to me that I unplug it after each and every backup, and only plug it in when running a backup. This is completely absurd. To think that they have placed inferior parts in a case and shipped them as a "backup solution" is infuriating. I suggested to the "customer support" person that the Western Digital" drives I have owned for the past 10 years have never seen a failure except when one was dropped. I informed him that I own a new 200G (sata) drive, and several drives ranging in age from 3-8 years of age- All of which have been powered on 24x7 for that entire time. He suggested that perhaps I should stick with WD drives if they make me happy. In the end, I am dreading the impending failure of the remaining drives here. I can only hope that none of the data is needed, and that it exists in more than one place if it is.

Reviewed by: grturgeon

Strengths: Ease of use & included Retrospect Software

Weaknesses: Drive failed after 15 months

Overall: I used the Maxtor One Touch 160 MB as a backup device. It has saved me several times, mostly from accidentally deleting or overwriting files. However, without warning, it failed today. Luckily, I have not lost any data. Not sure if I am going to replace it with Maxtor (for convenience) or move on to another manufacturer.

Reviewed by: olslvrwolf

Strengths: None

Weaknesses: Malfunctions Even Before The Warranty Is Up !!!!!!!

Overall: DO NOT BUY !!!!!!!I wish I had read these reviews before buying this piece of junk !!!I used this to back my system up to upgrade to Windows XP. Wanted to do a clean install and have a back up to use. My computer's hard drive is about 5 years old. I thought recently I should copy My Pictures back to my computer, but never really got around to it. After all this thing is only 5 Months old and my computer's drive at 5 years. Boy am I sorry now!!!