Maxtor External Hard Drives 

Maxtor has ramped up its external drive offerings, and now goes beyond the needs of a usual multimedia PC user. We reviewed three of these offerings-one meant for small businesses, a mini-NAS drive, another for personal use. 

The Maxtor OneTouch II Small Business Edition has a capacity of 200 GB and 8 MB of buffer Memory. It's a disk based backup solution for your organization as it bundles the Dantz Retrospect Express HD Server software. This converts the machine that's connected to the Maxtor drive into a server for backing up data. You then need to install the Maxtor OneTouch II client software on all the machines on your network to backup data onto the Maxtor drive. It also sends 



an e-mail notification to users whether backup has been completed or has failed. It has a spindle speed of 7200 RPM and comes with a USB 2.0/1.1 interface, which makes it easy to install and use. Our tests showed that the drive loads the PC's CPU by 79% when transferring data, which is lower than the FireWire edition of the same drive. 

The Maxtor One Touch II FireWire 800 Edition also had 200 GB capacity, 8 MB buffer memory and 7,200 RPM spindle speed. But this one is meant for individual users. 

This particular drive supports triple interface-USB 2.0/1.1, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800. It gives up to 64 Mbps of 



sustained data transfer rate with the FireWire 800 interface. We tested this drive on its FireWire 400 interface and it gave better performance in most of the benchmarks as compared to the Small Business Edition drive. The drive is also equipped with OneTouch II technology to back up data manually or automatically. The
installation CD comes with drivers, One Touch setup program and Dantz retrospect backup software.

The Maxtor Shared Storage Drive was a 300 GB capacity external drive with 16 MB buffer memory. It's ready to be plugged onto any TCP/IP based network, for which it has a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port. The drive plugs directly into a network and allows multiple PCs to access its storage. It has two USB ports to add storage or a network printer. It has a Web-based interface for managing storage. We only managed to achieve a maximum throughput of 5.42 Mbps while transferring data to the drive. 

Bottom Line: Bearing the SB Edition, the other drives match usability and price, and are good buys. SB Edition is costly.

Anubhav Verma