Maxtor A01C250 One Touch Personal Storage 250 GB Hard Drive for Mac

Rating:
Summary: Perfect Secondary/Backup for Laptops!
Review: I have been using Maxtor external hard drives for just over a year now and have made recommendations to family and colleagues which have resulted in them buying many of them as well. So with experience with close to a dozen hard drives, we have not had any problems and have nothing but praise for the drives.

First off, with internal hard drive prices for laptops so expensive and so difficult to install, external hard drives that use firewire (IEEE1394) are a great option. These hard drives use both firewire and USB, so you can take the information and hot swap it among multiple computer (like a thumb drive) or keep it plugged in to a single computer for use a secondary hard drive. I have found virtually no speed difference between accessing files on the external hard drive versus the internal.

The automatic backup feature, makes the hard drive all that much more useful. It comes bundled with Dantz Retrospect Express program which is an easy-to-use option for automatically backing up just what you want with a touch of a button. I backup often, usually just punching the button as I go meet to clients. It usually finishes the automated process by the time I return. Because backing up is so easy to do, when I did lose the hard drive on one of my laptops, I barely missed a beat after I got it replaced, simply restoring the drive image to make my new laptop look just like my old one.

I highly recommend Maxtor external hard drives.

Rating:
Summary: Click, click, a wave of heat and it's all gone
Review: This is the second drive I've bought from Maxtor. The first ended the same as the second one just has ended. You hear a clicking, it becomes more frequent. The drive feels hot. And whoosh, your data is gone! No more Maxtors for me. Maxtor company sends you a new drive if you give them your credit card number (to make sure you mail the old one back to them). I will not trust anything else by Maxtor. When you can't rely on a drive that your data won't disappear, then it is worth nothing.