I recently came into possession of a 320GB Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini (i.e. it was given to me). It’s a nice little compact and light 2.5″ external hard disk, convenient for carrying around with a notebook. If they could have a 320GB USB thumb drive, that would be even better. But I guess until such time we make do with these external disks. There’s nothing really spectacular with the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with it either. It does what it’s supposed to do.
It sounds so unexciting, that’s because external hard disks are commodity items. The backup programs that come included with the Maxtor drive are probably something “interesting” to PC users, but for a Mac user like me, Leopard’s Time Machine makes such programs irrelevant. Time Machine does everything for me, automatically.
I’m actually quite familiar with this drive. That’s because I bought the 1TB Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus last year. That is a big brother desktop version of the Mini. It has a Firewire port, in addition to USB. That’s about as much different as they go.
That the desktop external hard disk is clunky and needing a power supply is not a problem. It is “fixed” and not carried around. For the Mini, if I needed to carry it around, it can never be too small. Yeah, it would be lovely to have a 320GB USB thumb drive (which of course I’m sure will come not too far away).
Ps: We will definitely see more solid-state memories. We are already having SSD drives in notebooks and servers now.
Hi Zit Seng, Gary Tan. Tell me what you know about Kingston solid state drives which have recently been put on sale. Will they eventually replace current hard disk drives?
To some extent, definitely so in near future. As mentioned it is already starting to happen with notebooks and servers. But it will probably take a while for spinning disks to become totally extinct. It’s just like magnetic tape. Although magnetic tape continues to improve (slowly), it is not uncommon nowadays for backups to be done on massive arrays of cheap SATA drives.
i’m having problems with this one touch mini, my computer can’t seem to detect the external hard disk, its not e computer fault as i’ve tried out with other pnp’s, please help me
I have the same problem as dayyan, not recognised on my MAC, tried 2 different Mac’s one with 10.4 and the other 10.5 OS and neither will recognise the drive. any thoghts?