Review: Maxtor 160GB OneTouch 4 mini

By now, many of us have realized (painfully or otherwise) that having a back-up drive is important mandatory. Over the past two years, prices for drives have dropped to relatively affordable levels. Case in point: the average internal SATA terabyte drive is under $100.

I make two separate back-ups to two separate drives, using both Shirt Pocket Software’s SuperDuper and Apple’s own Time Machine. SuperDuper runs nightly, building a fully bootable backup of my main internal drive, while Time Machine runs hourly, performing incremental back-ups.

This system has served my needs very well on my desktop system. On my laptop, however, it’s a completely different story. Because of its mobile nature, it can be up to two weeks before I remember to make a back-up. Backing up a laptop’s hard drive takes more effort because it needs to be tethered to another device. (I haven’t yet made the jump to an online back-up system.)

Most external drives are big and bulky and are difficult to transport around. What I needed was a portable drive with a very small footprint, for back-ups on-the-go.

To that end (and for the purposes of creating an offsite back-up), I purchased a Maxtor 160GB OneTouch 4mini drive from CompUSA this past week.

The price was reasonable – I paid $44 + tax for the unit. Inside the box is a small instruction manual, the drive and a USB cable. The cable has two separate USB connectors on one end (one for power only, the other for power and data), in addition to a small connector that connects directly to the drive.

Maxtor’s instruction manual recommends to plug the Power USB connector first, then the small connector, followed by the Power + Data USB connector. This implies having two free USB ports on your system. Thankfully the drive works just as well when only using the Power + Data USB connector.

I didn’t install the included back-up software, so I can’t comment on that. Both Mac and PC versions are provided. The drive comes formatted for Windows (NTFS). This format is read-only on the Mac. I reformatted the drive using Disk Utility to allow both reads and writes to the drive.

The Maxtor OneTouch mini is extremely portable and seems to be constructed very well. It’s slightly larger and thicker than an iPod Touch, making it very convenient to transport. The drive itself is very quiet – so much so that if it weren’t for the large blinking LED indicator, I couldn’t tell if the drive was ON or not.

Read and write speeds were decent – no quantifiable numbers here – but certainly much faster than copying data onto a Flash USB drive.

I’m generally satisifed with my purchase, but I do wish Maxtor had included a travel pouch for the drive and cables. Aside from that minor quibble, the OneTouch Mini makes for a good portable back-up drive.

I use mine to back-up all my important documents and photos. I’m planning to purchase another OneTouch mini in the near future to have a rotating monthly back-up drive that I can place off-site.

Given that a decent 500GB drive can be had for $70, $40 for 160GB doesn’t seem like such a great deal on a GB/dollar ratio. What you are paying for, first and foremost, is portability.

I’d recommend this drive for laptop users wishing to have a portable back-up drive. If you have a desktop system or work with your laptop in a mostly tethered setting, there are better deals you can find elsewhere.

Highly recommended.

-Krishna

Krishna May 14, 2009 4mini, Maxtor, OneTouch, review