The market seems littered with hard drive enclosures and portable hard drives these days, yet we still seem to run into a new one every couple of weeks from some XYZ Company. Then Seagate sent over one of their Maxtor branded 250 GB portable hard drives known as their OneTouch 4 Mini. Although Seagate has its own line of min portable hard drives, the Maxtor drive provides distinctly more powerful backup features, despite a slightly more cobbled look versus the sleeker lines of their FreeAgent Pro products. Does the OneTouch 4 Mini wallow in mediocrity, or does it fight for its right to party? Let’s find out!
Features
The OneTouch 4 Mini features a USB 2.0 interface and support for both PC and Mac platforms, packed into a package about the size of two decks of playing cards, weighing only six ounces. Inside the casing is a 5400 RPM hard drive with 8 MB’s of cache onboard. You’ll find them in 80, 120, 160 and of course 250 GB capacities. A button on the front of the unit gives you direct access to the backup features of the drive through the included software.
Backed up by a 5 year warranty and something called SafetyDrill, Maxtor’s backup software, that rescues your PC from a virus or system failure, it might actually end up being useful. Unfortunately, Mac users get snubbed on this software feature, but apparently, they don’t have the issues that PC users have. The OneTouch 4 Mini supports Windows XP and Vista flavours and on the Mac side, works with Mac OS X (10.4.7 or later).
What’s In The Box?
In the box, you’ll find some software on a CD, a manual and a huge honking USB cable that seems totally out of place in the presence of this “mini” portable hard drive. The cable is almost larger than the drive itself!
Plug and Play Time…
The OneTouch 4 Mini requires the use of up to two USB connections in order to operate properly. Though most laptops will be fine operating with just one connection, some may require additional power. For users of laptops with few USB ports, this can be an issue if the second connection is required. The other end is mini-USB and plugs into a port located on the front left side of the unit. Once everything is a go, you’ll see the indicator/OneTouch button light up with glee.
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Software Setup
Next thing to do is to install the software. Although Maxtor gives you a CD, it isn’t actually necessary to use it to install the software, however, don’t throw it out yet. I promise to explain later. The drive contains the setup files for the Maxtor Manager software which gives you access to all the backup features including security and the Maxtor SafetyDrill software. Keep in mind that if you do format the drive, you’ll need to refer back to said CD for the installation files.
Doing The Safety Dance…
The Maxtor Manager software gives you access to your backup, software synchronization and security options. The security option offers you two levels of security: password level called DrivePass and files are encrypted and decrypted during drag and drop from the Encryption tool.
The backup and sync functions are pretty standard, allowing you to selectively backup files on your system on a schedule, however the star of the show if the SafetyDrill software. Through the options you can setup a backup interval to completely backup the contents of your hard drive and set a maximum allowable amount of space to allocate to this function. Once your backup is performed, in the event that your system is to go down in flames, you are able to restore your system to working order with the drive.
The software CD, which I mentioned earlier not to ditch, is required to allow you to boot the restoration software, and restore your system to a previous operational state from the backup. Maxtor does warn you to make sure that the CD does boot and that you are able to start the process. Typically, any problems with booting with the CD can be fixed by changing the boot order in your BIOS options. Having said that, I was able to test the CD successfully and get to the point where I was ready to restore my system to working order.
This software could also be useful for replacing a failed hard drive or upgrading to a new one, though if the target drive is bigger, it can only restore the same sized partition, leaving a chunk of free space. Luckily, Windows Vista can resize your partition for you in disk manager, but for users of other OS’s, you might need to invest in some disk management software to get all the space back, or you can just set it as a second partition.
Performance
No one likes waiting forever to backup or copy files from a slow ass drive. Although the OneTouch 4 Mini only comes with a 5400 RPM drive, we were hoping that it would turn out some decent numbers. We hooked it up to my ASUS U1F laptop and used HD Tune to see what kind of performance we could squeeze out of it.
From the results, it’s clear that the only bottleneck is the USB 2.0 interface as denoted by the flat line of the graph. It turned out a burst rate of 21.2 MB/s with an average transfer rate of 28.2 MB/s. Although it isn’t un-characteristic of USB hard drives to have a high CPU utilization, the 21.1% could be problematic for weaker systems when in the midst of multi-tasking.
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Final Thoughts
The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 250 GB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive does make a valiant effort to differentiate itself from all the other mini-hard drives out on the market. It’s chisseled features and well built casing protect it from the elements and inspires confidence in its ability to take a few bumps and bruises on the road. The OneTouch button though, seems like a bit of a one trick pony, becoming pretty much useless if you don’t use the included software. However, there isn’t any reason why you shouldn’t use it.
Well, if you’re a Mac user, then the software is less of a selling feature. I guess Mac users just don’t seem to have the same problems with crashes and weird failures like PCs do or something. I dunno. Not a Mac user here. For the PC folks like you and me, the SafetyDrill feature will probably end up saving your digital life one of these days if your system goes down. Even if you suck at backups, you can set the software to remind you to do it and while it does the backup dance, you can continue to work as its an automated process. Extra security features help you keep your data shielded from prying eyes.
Overall though, the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini is a solid portable unit. Built well with up to 250 GB’s of storage as tested, it should provide lots of peripheral storage and be that shining beacon of hope when things go south. It’s not exactly cheap at a around $199 bucks for our 250 GB unit, as tested, but it does do everything that it has promised. Now if only they could find some way to work a bit of design magic into that hideously huge generic USB cable.
Pros
- Small size and high quality build.
- SafetyDrill software can be a real “Digital Life” saver.
Cons
- Huge honking USB cable really takes away from the portability and looks of the unit.
- It’s small, but the price isn’t small.
Overall Rating: 8.5 / 10.0
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