Reviews for Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack - Retail

Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack...

I completely agree with the last reviewer. I bought my Maxtor last year. Its worked wonderfully RIGHT TO THE POINT IT DIED! Don't buy these dogs - they do lull you into a false sense of dependability - then WHAM! 250GB down the tubes...

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Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack...

Weakness: Drive completely failed within first 6 months

It was too easy to unload excess files from my computer to my Maxtor back up drive not realizing that when the Maxtor drive failed, I would lose all my important data. Yes, Maxtor will exchange my failed unit for a replacement, but that doesn't rescue my data! Recovery has been quoted at $1000 to $2700. (Isn't it revealing that the customer service reps at Maxtor have a handy list of data recovery services right at their fingertips?) In my case it was a hardware failure. The Editors at PC WORLD should re-evaluate the validity of their recommendation based on the number of reports of catastrophic failure by owners of the One Touch drive!!

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Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack...

Strengths: None

Weakness: Malfunctions Even Before The Warranty Is Up !!!!!!!

DO NOT BUY !!!!!!!

I wish I had read these reviews before buying this piece of junk !!!

I used this to back my system up to upgrade to Windows XP. Wanted to do a clean install and have a back up to use. My computer's hard drive is about 5 years old. I thought recently I should copy My Pictures back to my computer, but never really got around to it. After all this thing is only 5 Months old and my computer's drive at 5 years. Boy am I sorry now!!!

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Maxtor One Touch 160 MB

Strengths: Ease of use & included Retrospect Software

Weakness: Drive failed after 15 months

I used the Maxtor One Touch 160 MB as a backup device. It has saved me several times, mostly from accidentally deleting or overwriting files. However, without warning, it failed today. Luckily, I have not lost any data.

Not sure if I am going to replace it with Maxtor (for convenience) or move on to another manufacturer.

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Never again

Strengths: *lol*

Weakness: Failure rate Unreliable performance

Having started at a new company, I was impressed to see employees' PCs having an external drive attached for backup purposes. There are about 20 or so scattered throughout, and I was very glad to know users were responsible for their data's protection.

I told a friend of mine about this, and he started to laugh. Out loud even! He told me that at his (much) larger corporation they too had purchased a (larger) group of these drives. However, he reported to me that their failure rate was rather high. It was so high I didn't completely believe him. He even showed me the remnants of one such device which had completely melted a transistor on the circuit board of the drive. Still, I was wary of his results.

Today, my drive killed itself. I noticed that its performance had degraded over the past few days, and it seems today was it's final act. I have lost approximately 200G of files I use on a very regular basis. I have also lost CD images for Windows installs that I had crafted over the past month to our specific requirements.

When I contacted "customer support" at maxtor, the person I spoke with told me that they did not reccomend heavy usage of the drive. In fact, he suggested to me that I unplug it after each and every backup, and only plug it in when running a backup. This is completely absurd. To think that they have placed inferior parts in a case and shipped them as a "backup solution" is infuriating.

I suggested to the "customer support" person that the Western Digital" drives I have owned for the past 10 years have never seen a failure except when one was dropped. I informed him that I own a new 200G (sata) drive, and several drives ranging in age from 3-8 years of age- All of which have been powered on 24x7 for that entire time. He suggested that perhaps I should stick with WD drives if they make me happy.

In the end, I am dreading the impending failure of the remaining drives here. I can only hope that none of the data is needed, and that it exists in more than one place if it is.

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I'm sooooo sorry I trusted all my pictures/music to...

Strengths: ?

Weakness: Totally unreliable

I spent $300 so I would never again have to worry about losing all my pictures/music and everything that's dear to me. After my PC crashed a few months ago, none of my backup restore points were recognized by the software that comes with. A 3rd party tool could see all the data on the drive but it was useless. Maxtor "customer service" said it probably happened because I unplugged the thing???? Well, I figured it was user error. I made sure I never did that again, made all my backups religiously and manually copied all my pics and music over as well as doing the backups.

Now, I replaced my harddrive and plugged in the Maxtor and the message says: drive is not formatted, do you want to format now. "Customer service" says there must be corrupted sectors and I should use a recovery service and reformat and then the drive "should work fine". What a piece of work! I regret the money spent on that thing and I will never ever buy anything with the name Maxtor on it.

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Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack...

Weakness: Failure with no recovery.

I've had 3 of these pieces of junk and 3 sudden failures around the one year mark. These things will lull you into a fall sense of confidence and all of a sudden they will fail within hours with no advance sign of trouble. I lost my last backup today and felt the need to write a review to warn others. Just buy an extra internal hard drive or go with a different brand.

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250GB Drive Failure After 13 Months

Strengths: Quick drive. Has both USB and Firewire ports (on my model).

Weakness: It died.

As others have said, the drive worked flawlessly until the day it died. I should have suspected something to be amiss when my defragger couldn't access a folder and claimed that the FOLDER was unformatted -- I'm an EE and I've never seen that type of error before! I (stupidly) cycled power on the drive in an attempt to rectify the problem. I should have copied the data from the drive when I had a chance. Now, 9 years of graphic design, 43GB of music, 100GB of movies, and other files with varying levels of
sentimental value are lost -- gone -- vapour.

When taking the hard drive board apart, I noticed GREEN WIRE on the board! This is a production board, not a prototype! For those of you that don't know, a green wire soldered by hand to fix a mistake that was made in laying out the board. In addition, there was an UPSIDE DOWN tantalum capacitor soldered by hand too. I'm not making this up.

Another poster had faulted me for not backing up my data; and, that's justified. YOU SHOULD ROUTINELY BACKUP your data. However, I'm not an idiot for expecting my new computer hardware to function properly and for a reasonable period of time BEYOND its warrentee period.

Save yourself the trouble and buy a Seagate with a 5 year warranty.

NEVER EVER EVER AGAIN will I buy a Maxtor.

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Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack...

Weakness: 12 month warranty

Bought what I thought was best.... at month 16 drive dies... tech support laughed at this... if you value your data burn it to a CD or DVD... I trusted Maxtor and lost all of my data... NO support from Maxtor NONE... now I have a nice doorstop...

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Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack...

Weakness: Drive Failure

I had a dying internal Hard Drive. I purchased the maxtor external drive to backup everything before the internal drive failed. I managed to backup about 3/4 of my stuff to the Maxtor drive before the internal drive failed.

2 Days later the Maxtor External Drive failed!

Maxtor said This is common in new drives and I should not rely on their drives for backup and should always backup to CD or DVD".

I have now lost everything and Maxtor said unless I use a Maxtor certified Data Recovery Center (Big $$$) I will void the warranty on the drive nad not be able to get a replacment.

I am Very Unhappy With this Product and Maxtor's REsponse the the situation...

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Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack...

Strengths: Ease of use, included software, peace of mind

Weakness: Setup required a bit of computing knowledge, quick setup sheet is good but need to refer to user's guide also

I should have purchased the Maxtor 300GB a long time ago. When my computer's internal hard drive started making strange noises, I immediately decided to go all the way and get the Maxtor 300GB. Setup was relatively simple. The other reviewers mentioned the lack of partitioning software and the need for 3rd party software, but Windows XP has its own partitioning capability. I was able to convert the Maxtor from FAT32 to NTFS and partition from within Windows. The excellent user's guide walks you through it. No 3rd party software was needed. I set up the Retrospect backup software, even though I didn't plan to use it. I then proceeded to backup my entire hard drive. Well, as it turned out, the backup software I had was not working properly. I needed to use the Retrospect program to do the complete backup, not thinking I would be able to, and it worked like a breeze. Even though I purchased a 3rd party backup program, Retrospect was much easier to use. I did use the USB 2.0 connection, so it was fast. Now I feel secure knowing I have a complete system backup, and the one-touch feature will make it easy to schedule regular backups in the future. It looks great and takes up little room sitting on its stand. I definitely made a wise purchase and would recommend the Maxtor 300GB to anyone.

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Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack...

Strengths: Massive hard drive space!

Weakness: A little slower than some...5400 rpm vs. 7200 rpm

While the hard drive at 5400 rpm, it still works pretty fast with the firewire connections. The options of firewire, USB 1 and 2 are excellent. Also, I was able to plug my digital camera as an input into the hard drive instead of having to go through my laptop. Movie files are extremely memory intensive, so this elimated my problem with my C:/ drive temp file filling up.

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Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack...

Strengths: Large harddrive space, Easy software, Allows multiple scripts for backing up

Weakness: Super slow for USB1, Need third party software to partition

The massive storage capacity of this external drive made it a "must have". There is plenty of room to back up multiple harddrives and computers. The instructions for setting up were relativey straight forward. I was a bit disappointed that it came already formated rather than using the typical Maxtor harddrive software that allows you to partition the drive as you need -- Maxtor suggests a partition per PC/Laptop and recommends third party software to partition the drive (which I didn't have). I needed to reformat the drive over anyways for NTFS, so it would have been nice to have just been able to partition and format as I wanted to begin with. The format went fine and I set up the Retrospect backup with little problem. When I tried to use it, I kept receiving write errors to the drive. It ended up that it wouldn't work through a USB hub. Once I gave the drive it's own dedictated USB port, it began working fine. On the OneTouch button, you can only backup one path. I had wanted the OneTouch to do 2 out of 4 drive partitions, but this wasn't possible. The overall backup of the system in compressed mode (including all the drives) seems to work quite well, although I happily haven't needed to restore from it yet. It has a nice scheduled backup feature to keep your backup set up-to-date and allows creation of recovery disks for the main system. USB1 is painfully slow. It took over 9 hours to backup and verify a 14GB harddrive. Once the initial backup is done, the backup goes much quicker because only changed files are transferred to the drive. Overall, the drive seems to be a good investment. I figure a slow backup is better than no backup at all. As I get new computer equipment with USB2, the performance will improve and it should still have ample capacity to backup what's needed. It's much easier to press a button and walk away than to fuss around making multiple CD or DVD backups of the information (given that you don't need the permanence of the CD or DVD).

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Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB External Hard Drive - 1 Pack...

Strengths: Very easy to setup and use.

Weakness: None found

This is by far the best hard drive solution I have seen for backing up data files or your entire system. It is very easy to operate, and really takes the guess work out of backing up.

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Quality Product

Strengths: Whoa, made of metal. No plastic, not even the buttons. You can just feel the quality of this thing.

Weakness: none

This is a great drive. The onetouch feature works like a charm, thanks to the included Dantz Retrospect software. While the "one-touch" button works, it is not needed as Retrospect runs automatically based on setup. GREAT PRODUCT!

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Two Pieces of Junk

Strengths: Good until it dies.

Weakness: Sudden failure with no indicators.

I have one Maxtor 360GB firewire One Touch that is still working but starts with a really annoying "Angry Bee" fan for a few minutes. This started with less than 3 months time.
I have a 500GB One Touch Firewire 800 that failed in less than one year and now I have a 1 Terrabyte One Touch firewire 800 that has died today with less than 8 months on it. It's only now that I see many other people are reporting the same problems.
The only good thing is that it was being used for a Drive Image backup, so all I lost was the money for the Maxtor and the backup files. The original files are fine but now unprotected until I buy a better drive tonight.
Though my 3 drives are not identical to the one reviewed here, they all exibit the same poor quality and failure that people with the 300GB One Touch are reporting here.

Burn me once, shame on Maxtor... Burn me three times, I should have my head examined!! So why is one star the lowest rating? No Zero Star?

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Kiss your data good bye

Strengths: Heavy enclosure increases utility as door stop.

Weakness: Failed after less than a year

I have a 300 that received very light use--just making an occasional backup copy of my internal drive. After less than a year it stopped working. I would recommend avoiding this drive at all costs.

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