Maxtor One Touch III 300GB USB2/Firewire 400 Combo

I have a Maxtor 750 gb one touch III drive. The ice cold colored side panels are a poor idea because they are a poor heat dissipater. I contacted Seagate product support twice and they never mentioned or acknowledged an overheating problem. A classic symptom of overheating is a computer lockup. Because Seagate would not admit to the problem I spent countless hours unloading and reloading software then testing the results. In the end I popped off the plastic side panels and screwed the brushed aluminum perimeter strip back into place and now it works. It looks ugly but at least it is function over form and not the other way around. I had a one touch I before and bought a new Maxtor backup because I liked the backup software. The Maxtor design group needs a tune up in heat transfer and get back to making aluminum cases with heat fins and get their product support group to come clean with customers.

Very good product, great value for money, works really well as an external drive. The backup software is not the neatest or easiest GUI but it does work. Has been a reliable product that performed as expected and more.

My home PC has accumulated lots of personal stuff (no, not that kind), digital images, music etc, which would be a pain and expensive to have to replace. So I asked some expert techies at work for some advice on a good external drive to get. They came up with 2. Western Digital My Book and Maxtor One Touch.

I, on the other hand, had seen a Teac drive, which judging by their stereo stuff I thought would be high quality. It was also cheaper and looked better, which swayed me a bit. I bought one and needless to say, it was the wrong thing to do. From day 1 it wasn't being recognised by my PC at home and several other PCs at work, which I tried it on. So I sent it back and got a refund (except they still haven't refunded my postage, you nasty www.pixmania.com people).

I then went on to buy a Western Digital Premium My Book 320GB, which have some good reviews out there in the interweb. I had problems with this as well and found some negative reviews which explained some problems people have with these. The My Book doesn't have a fan, so sometime can overheat, which is basically what happened to me. My first objective was to get a complete backup of my PC. The My Book runs and back everything up until it gets a little hot and then the backup software comes up with write errors. I tried several times but each time it overheats after about 45 minutes or so, 25% though the backup. So I sent that one back and got a refund (including my postage, you nice people at www.amazon.co.uk).

So I bought a Maxtor One Touch III External 300GB (with an extra 20GB free - wohoo!). The rest is history. I'm not a technogeek, but this baby really is the business. It has a fan so it doesn't overheat! Yes, yes, I reformatted to NTFS, which is dead easy and recommended for all drives

It just works, and works well. Okay, I might be slightly influenced by the other 2 drives failing miserably, but the Maxtor is a top piece of kit and it's easy to use.

I plugged it in, re-formatted it, loaded the software that comes with it and, away it went. I have everything backed up!

What more could you want.