ElectroNext.com

Complete trash! Only buy if you enjoy hearing your money and data disappear with a CRASH!! (2008-12-01)
This is the biggest hunk of junk I've ever seen. STAY AWAY FROM THIS DRIVE!!! It crashed within the first two months, and it was only used and turned on 5 times total in that period as I manually backed things up. I lost all data! I will NEVER buy another Maxtor product, and since Seagate owns them I will never buy a Seagate item. Look into Buffalo, I have had good luck with them, and their customer service actually trys to help you instead of laughing in your face and telling you to pay them more money.

Stick to your OEM business, Maxtor (2008-11-11)
What can I say... poor software, horrible installation experience (installation crashed 3 times on my XP SP3 Dell XPS machine), drive disappear and won't wake, and very noisy. Overall seems like Maxtor has no idea what a good user experience is and their website is also worthless. Compared to my Buffalo external drive, which works without any software installed, this thing feels like a "beta".

Maxtor, you make good harddrives for PC and you should stick to that business only, stop trying to make a product directly for the average consumer because you failed!

An Unreliable Drive for your important data. (2008-11-10)
I had bought this Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo for my Apple Mac G5 system as a backup drive and have been using for over a year. The drive suddenly stopped working, my Mac does not recognize it. I tried using Data Rescue® software to see if it can mount the drive so I can safely copy the data and retire this Maxtor. Everything failed. Since I had used this as a RAID 0 the chanced for recovering the data is bleak. It is always a good practice to have valuable data backed on to DVD's. :( .

Bad "Touch". But read the solution to backup here. (2008-11-02)
After suffering a catastrophic loss with my first One Touch, and a secondary but less critical failure of another, I finally did my homework and discovered Maxtor's simple solution was not a reliable solution, and that the truly reliable solution was not all that complex.

I am writing this not only as a caution to others, but also as a suggestion on how to start a reliable approach to backup.

THE PROBLEM: Despite my customer research, the Maxtor one Touch II and One Touch III are the worst product decisions I have made in some time - and there is a reason for this.

Of the 2 Maxtor One Touch II's and one Maxtor One Touch III's only one of my II's continue to run. The first failure cost $3,000 to get the data recovered. Unfortunately I was also using it for data overflow at the time.

The second (This model One Touch III) also died about a year after I purchased it. Fortunately I was using only for backup.

They run great out-of-the-box, but after a year they wither and die. Why? I am not sure if it's the incremental file-backup software, or the hardware. Perhaps it is a combination of both, as Maxtor's incremental file-backup software progressively causes slower and slower operation, and more and more drive utilization.

Google the words "Maxtor repair". There are many vendors. And with most, once they have your drive, it's usually the most expensive thing that needs to be repaired, typically requiring rebuilding the physical electronics.

And considering the proprietary nature of Maxtor's drivers I don't find this price surprising.

Final point: You cannot recover your system if you suffer a complete crash. Expect to reinstall Windows, Office, get updates, and enter licenses, etcetera. You can recover your files, yes, if your unit is still running.

THE SOLUTION: Get a reliable high capacity internal or external bare bones hard drive, and use image backup software, not file backup software. There's a fundamental difference between "file" and "image" backups.

I had several misconceptions about image backup software. But I discovered one can also recover individual files. And MORE importantly, you can recover your entire system as well - very simply from the backup drive. It runs faster, it does a form of incremental backup based on image changes, and is much more reliable. It is rare that a solution is both cheaper and better. And I was not looking for cheaper.

For a hard drive I use a WD 1T Sata. And my software is ShadowProtect desktop. I am sure there are others.

By the way, with this solution, you own the software, so it's not tied to some device that will fail. I also (once a month) do a one shot backup to my inexpensive Western Digital Passport. Again as I own the software, I can apply it to any number of different physical backup devices that do not carry the extra overhead cost of proprietary software and hardware.

EXTRA: In addition, you might want to also consider iDrive, or Carbonite. I would use them for your documents only.

SUMMARY: Unfortunately only those that have experienced the loss of work-related or financial data, family pictures, or even that report that your child wrote of which you are most proud, will appreciate the advantage of being prepared.

Then to compound the problem, once we have experienced loss, we start out by looking for a simple solution. And we may be impressed with the concept of "One Touch".

But after suffering a catastrophic loss with my first One Touch, and a secondary but less critical failure of another, I finally did my homework and discovered Maxtor's simple solution was not a reliable solution, and that the truly reliable solution was not all that complex.

Avoid at any price (2008-09-17)
I just lost my warranty replacement drive (and all data) the second time. My experience is that the disks work just long enough to load them up with data and then they turn into inert bricks. Maxtor replaced my first drive but their automated warranty replacement web site says I can't get the replacement replaced so I'm out my data and my money.