One Touch III

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The OneTouch III family of hard drives continues the Maxtor reputation for producing large capacity external drives, suitable for home users, advanced users and small businesses.

Pros

  • Large capacity, Dual interface

Cons

  • Software too technical for some

Bottom Line

A competitive back up solution from Maxtor, that has something for everyone.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 549.00 (AUD)

Special Offers

While its predecessor, the OneTouch II was finished in silver, it's clear Maxtor have taken some trouble with the design of the newer model. Our review unit, the dual interface Firewire 400/USB2.0 model, was finished in a rather odd looking pale green, with rubberized outer edges. On the front is a large button, backlit in a rather bright white light. (We found this light flashed when the drive was in use, and as it was so big, it soon became very distracting.) At the back of the unit is the USB 2.0 port, two Firewire ports and the power sockets. Styling is really a matter of personal preference, and while the OneTouch III isn't as innovative as the We also prefer this design to the old the OneTouch II, which required a stand, and couldn't stand upright without it. The OneTouch III can sit either vertically or horizontally, as you choose, without the need for any accompaniment. In fact if you need to, you could no doubt stack multiple drives on top of each other. Bucking the trend against miniaturization, this unit is larger and slightly heavier than its predecessor. While the OneTouch III is technically classified as 'portable' storage, we think it's more suited to being placed on a desk, rather than carted around with a notebook.

The Maxtor OneTouch III is plug and play and requires no software to simply be used as an external drive. Within minutes after taking it out of the box, we had the drive hooked up and were transferring files. For specific backup and settings operations, the unit ships with Dantz Retrospect Express 1.1 and Maxtor One Touch Manager. It took less than five minutes to install both of these programs. (For more details on the Retrospect software, we recommend you check out our OneTouch II review.)

The OneTouch Manager software is a little different to the software that shipped with the OneTouch II, although many of the options are the same. You can for example, set Power saving settings, configure the OneTouch button or change the performance level of the drive. From the Manager screen, you can also schedule backups, restore data and perform rollback operations. One other interesting feature that caught our eye was 'Synchronise'. This allows you to specify certain folders that whatever changes you make will be automatically mirrored on the drive - very useful for backing up My Documents for example. If you're worried about security, the OneTouch III allows you to set a password which locks the drive.

Specifications wise, the OneTouch III is very similar to the OneTouch II. While our review model came with a 500GB hard drive, the speed (7200RPM), seek time and sustained transfer rate were about the same as the II.

The Maxtor OneTouch III is available in sizes of 200GB, 300GB and 500GB with a USB2.0 connection, a dual interface USB2.0 and Firewire 400 model or a triple interface USB2.0, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 model.

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