Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini

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.