Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition 1TB

Features of the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition

Connectivity

Maxtor gave us lots of connectivity options with the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition. You can choose between USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800. Maxtor even included all three cable types, which is great. FireWire cables can run near $20, so having them included is a nice touch.

External Drive

To get the huge 1TB of storage space, Maxtor uses two of their 500GB hard drives in a RAID 0 default configuration which spans data across both drives for 1TB of storage space. You also have the option of configuring the drive to support RAID 1, which mirrors the data between the two internal drives for a 500GB capacity, but offering much greater data security.

The sides of the drive are covered in a rubberized protective coating to help protect the drives form daily use. Maxtor includes management software that also allows you to set a password to access the data on the drive. Maxtor quotes sustained data transfer speeds of 91 MB/s for FireWire 800, 43 MB/sec for FireWire 400 and 33 MB/sec for USB 2.0.

Software

In addition to the disk management software that allows you to set the disc password and change the RAID type, Maxtor also includes a easy to use backup application called EMC Retrospect Express HD. With this software you are able to configure automatic backups of your enter system or just specific folders, or even specific files. You choose the days of the week and the time the back up occurs.

Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition in Use

Setup

Setting up the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition was very easy to do. Unpack the drive, choose your connection type (I used FireWire 400) and plug in the power cable. Mac users will be ready to use the drive at this point. Windows users will need to format the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition to NTFS or FAT32. The format to NTFS was easy to do via Windows Disk Manager and took about 5 minutes to complete.

Testing & Benchmarks

I used both synthetic and real world testing to get an idea of the performance of the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition. For synthetic testing I used SiSoftware Sandra 2007 and for the real world tests I moved a large 1.03GB folder to and from the drive and timed the process.

Sandra 2007

I used the removable storage benchmark from Sandra 2007 to get these performance numbers on the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition:

2MB Files
• Read- 1205 Operations/minute
• Write- 888 Operations/minute
• Delete- 329302 Operations/minute
• Combined: 1196 Operations/minute

64MB Files
• Read- 37 Operations/minute
• Write- 28 Operations/minute
• Delete- 286968 Operations/minute
• Combined- 37 Operations/minute

Real World Tests

To get some real word performance numbers from the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition, I copied a large folder containing 1.03GB of data to and from the drive and timed the process. The results are as follows:

• Write- 0:33:03
• Read- 0:25:09
• Delete- 0:0:26

Final Thoughts

The Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition is an excellent external drive with great performance and tons of storage space. The drive is easy to setup and offers multiple connectivity options. Maxtor aimed the drive at Mac users, but it can be used for Windows as well with a simple reformat. At the end of the day, the super storage capacity and the great performance make this drive an excellent option for external storage suited for many needs from video streaming to mobile data backup. Highly recommended!