Maxtor OneTouch 4Plus review and more…

I’m pleased to report that Operation “Erase and Install” on my Macbook Pro was an unqualified success.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I purchased a Maxtor OneTouch 4Plus external drive last night at (gasp!) Best Buy. I wasn’t crazy about giving them my money, but I needed an external drive ASAP, and the price $129 for a 500GB external drive with both Firewire and USB interfaces was within my budget.

The OneTouch 4Plus drive comes with a power adaptor, USB 2.0 cable, Firewire 400 cable, very sparse documentation and a disc. The packaging was solid, and (surprisingly) somewhat Apple-like in presentation. The unit carries a 5 year warranty, supported by Seagate (the owner of all Maxtor drives now).

The drive itself looks attractive and feels solid. The front of the drive features a white light that flickers when the drive is active. On the back are ports for an AC power adaptor, 2 Firewire ports, and one USB port. There is no On/Off switch. The OneTouch 4Plus sits upright and has a wide footprint.

I ran Apple’s System Profiler to determine some specifics on the actual drive inside. It’s a Maxtor model, but I couldn’t determine the cache size or other drive specs. (The website mentions that the internal drive is a 7200RPM drive with 16MB of cache). SMART Status is not supported, and based on my own experience, the drive is not bootable.

The drive puts itself to sleep when not in use, and spins up fast with minimal delay. I found the performance of the drive to be fast when used with the Firewire port. I did not test the USB 2.0 interface.

Make no mistake, this drive has been marketed as a “simple backup and storage solution” and it does that very well. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I ran Super Duper and cloned my Macbook Pro’s internal drive to the Maxtor. No problems whatsoever.

After the data was completely cloned, I reformatted the Macbook Pro’s drive, reinstalled Leopard, then ran all the updates to bring it up to 10.5.3. In addition to my own Users account, I created a new administrator account – for the sole purpose of running Apple’s own Migration Assistant.

Migration Assistant copied all my third-party applications and data from the Maxtor drive back onto the Macbook Pro’s drive. Despite Migration Assistant’s misleading progress meter (which repeatedly mentioned ‘less than one minute remaining’), all my data and applications made it through safe and sound after about an hour or so.

I ran into a slight dilemma with Photoshop. I had unauthorized it before making my back-up copy (as advised by a reader). When it came time to reauthorize the application, I realized that the original disc and serial # were at home in Tampa. Thankfully, Adobe has a method by which I could retrieve my serial numbers via their website. It definitely paid off to register the software.

The Macbook Pro runs blazingly fast – and doing the clean install freed up a whopping 6 additional GB. Very happy with how smooth the whole process went, and so far – I’m pleased with the OneTouch 4Plus drive.

-Krishna

Krishna June 19, 2008