Gadgets and Video Games

The Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini is a sleek and very compact external hard drive. The outer casing is made of an aluminum top cover, plastic surrounding the sides and rubber on the bottom to assure that it does not slide. Behind the stylish case lies a 5400 RPM, 2.5″ PATA hard drive with 8MB of cache memory.

Maxtor has three available sizes to choose from; 80GB, 120GB, or a whopping 160GB. These hard drives are quite affordable starting at $99.99 to $149.99, and discounted much lower at many retailers.

In this review, I am going to be speaking of the 80GB Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini, for more specific information, take a look at Maxtor’s OneTouch 4 website.

Maxtor has outdone themselves yet again! This hard drive is sleek looking, very lightweight, and it produces very little noise! Because of its size, you can easily slip it into your shirt pocket or in your purse and have all your data with you at all times.

The One Touch 4 Mini has only one mini-USB 2.0 port on it, so no need for external power, the hard drive will operate on the power of the USB bus alone. Once you have the drive up and going you will notice the “One Touch” button, “hence the name,” glowing a light blue. The button is also an activity indicator, blinking when the drive is active.

The Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini does require a special cable that is included in the packaging. it is a (Y) like cable, on one end you have the mini 2.0 USB 2 that plugs into the drive, then you have two full size USB connections. One is labeled data power, and the other is labeled power, both of these are required! “I am running XP Pro. and tried power the hard drive with an ordinary cable and the machine did not recognize the drive, so you’ll need to have two usb ports available!”

Performance:
I have tested the performance of the hard drive while it was hooked up to my laptop. I am running Windows XP Professional with all the current updates. Here are the basic hardware components of the laptop:

CPU Type: Mobile Intel Celeron M, 1500 MHz (15 x 100)
Motherboard Name: TOSHIBA Satellite L25
System Memory: 1920 MB
Disk Drive: FUJITSU MHV2040AH (40 GB, 5400 RPM, Ultra-ATA/100)

The drive was detected immediately and was able to be used. As I stated previously, you must use the original (Y) cable! I tried it with a regular cable with no results!

I then decided to benchmark the drive with two similar programs: HD Tune 2.53 and HD Tach. As you can see, both tests provide very impressive results. I have provided a snapshot of both tests.

The hard drive was very quick in testing, and on top of that, there was no noise, “complete silence!” As for heat, I am sorry to say that I was unable to perform this test myself, although from what I would estimate, and from what an associate of mine has said, it is holding steady at an ambient temperature of 76F (24.4C) and the maximum temperature reading was 108F. This in fact is cooler than most external hard drives in sealed enclosures.

Software:
The software that comes bundled with the hard drive is totally new as well, the software was developed in-house at Seagate/Maxtor. The application suite is called Maxtor Manager. The Maxtor Manager has variety of functions in a very easy to use interface. Installation is quick and easy. Then after rebooting your system, you are up and ready to go.

Once you open the software suit, you are greeted with the “My Drives” dialog box. The Maxtor Manager provides a view of compatible drives; here you can configure a variety of settings, such as the One Touch Button and configure when your drive goes into power saving mode.

Backup:
Now if you click the (Backup) icon you are presented with options on how, what, and when to backup your files. But of course you can create a custom backup of your choice, and set the time to run your custom backup. The software or the One Touch Button on the drive can then open a backup.

Sync:
By clicking on the sync icon a dialog box opens and you can choose to run a simple sync or a custom sync. By default a simple sync will only sync your (My Documents Folder). What is (Sync)? Sync allows you to create a copy of a specific folder or files, then once you hook you hard drive up to a different computer, the synced files will then be cloned to the new computer.

Safety:
Maxtor has built into the drive what they like to call (Safety Drill). This allows you to create a complete copy of your laptop or desktop hard drive. This feature is very handy if your computer should ever crash. If you should ever need to restore your computer, you will need to pop the additional CD into your CD Rom (which is provided by Maxtor in the original packaging). This is a custom Linux based CD that is used to boot up and get the recovery process started while accessing the One Touch 4 Drive for its contents.
This is necessary feature to have!

Security:
This is the last icon in the Maxtor Manager Application. This is where the user can create a password to protect the whole hard drive using (Drive Pass). You can also encrypt certain folders or files on the hard drive. With Drive Pass you can create your password, you can then set up a reminder question, just in case you should happen to forget your password. If you do set up a password, it will be required every time the drive is connected to a computer or powered up!

If you want to encrypt files or folders, this will require you to setup another password just for the encryption part of the software. Once you have setup your password another window will launch, simply drag the folder or file you want encrypted into that window – at this point you’re done, the software does the rest.

The Maxtor Manager software is exceptionally useful and very easy to understand as well as very user friendly. The Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini provides excellent utilities that maximize the use of the drive. The only problem that I could see is if you have a lot of large data files, you could fill this hard drive up very easily! “With that being said,” I would suggest purchasing a full size Maxtor One Touch 4 series hard drive, or look for another solution if the 160GB capacity on the (current) largest version will not suffice.

Overall Rating:

Conclusion:
When it comes to external storage solutions, your options are endless. Yes the 80GB Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini will work great for some of us, where as others may not need all of the features that the Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini has to offer. The software that is bundled with the Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini really sets it apart from other storage solutions. With the bundled software backups are simple, and with features like Drive Pass and Safety Drill your data is secure if you misplace your drive.

After reviewing the 80GB Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini I would recommend this drive for consumers looking for a good portable data storage device.

Pros:
- Easy setup
- Silent
- Runs cool
- Very user friendly
- Above average performance
- Safety Drill-provides effortless system recovery
- Software-useful features

Cons:
- If you have a lot of large data files, you could fill this hard drive up very easily!

Tags: Maxtor, portable storage, usb, usb hard drives