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Rating: 
Summary: Perfect Secondary/Backup Hard Drive 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: Works fine for me
Review: I have had this for about 3 months now with no problem (knock on wood). I use the sony iLink connection (Sony's Firewire) and can record television to it and play back from it at the same time with no problem (3.35 GB per hour quality level). I have not noticed any extra noise from it and find the one touch backup functionality convienient for internal drive backup.
Rating:
Summary: Works fine for me
Review: I have had this for about 3 months now with no problem (knock on wood). I use the sony iLink connection (Sony's Firewire) and can record television to it and play back from it at the same time with no problem (3.35 GB per hour quality level). I have not noticed any extra noise from it and find the one touch backup functionality convienient for internal drive backup.
Rating: 
Summary: Frustrating Failure
Review: I spent a lot of hours loading 300 plus music CD's onto this storage device so I could use it as a jukebox. In less than 2 weeks of having it, the device starting making loud "tick-tock" sounds, even when not in use. I can no longer access any of the contents of this drive. I contacted Maxtor. It is still under warranty, and they agreed to replace it. There is no attempt to fix the drive you have. They simply exchange it for another one. I am without a drive right now. I am planning on storing all my digital photos there, but I am not confident it is safe. I feel as though I need to buy another one to back up the information on my drive that should be used as the backup. I am deciding if I will buy another Maxtor or something else - perhaps a Western Digital.
Rating: 
Summary: Buy a Fire Wire instead
Review: I wonder how many people who write these reviews still feel the same after a few months. Initially was THRILLED with a fast- portable hard drive to use as an archive for home and office....until it started filling up...so to speak.
with only about 9gb on the disk, it makes starting up Windows about a 10-12 minute wait while it "scans" all the data on the Maxtor. Once opened, the transfer/access rate is like working on an old 386 machine... and it's 10 times worse with a USB 1.1 connection! I thought for CERTAIN that the problem was me. I defragged, rebooted, deleted half the files..... no luck. Stay with a fire wire, especially if you are replaying any music or video. Can't imagine someone using this thing to do a presentation. Mine is now a pretty paper weight.
Rating:
Summary: Answer to my problem
Review: That's what the Maxtor 5000DV has been for me. I recently purchased a digital video camera but my Dell laptop only has a 30GB harddrive. And that is not enough space for even short term storage of my DV's. Plus I was looking for an easier way to take image copies of my Windows partition. The Maxtor 5000DV fills both of these roles very well. With a 120GB's of storage (actually it's only about 112GB's in reality) I can now download my DV's in their highest quality without worrying about space. I can also take an image copy of my C partition in minutes now rather than the lengthy time it took to write it to CD-R's. One thing to consider for any potential buyers though. I am using this drive with a Firewire connection. The Firewire cable supplied by Maxtor is a 6-pin to 6-pin cable. I needed a 6-pin to 4-pin to connect the Maxtor 5000DV to my laptop and my camera (so I needed 2 cables!). Not a big deal but something to consider. If you need more storage space this is the way to go. It installed in 5 minutes, the first time and has worked great ever since. I connected it up with USB 1.1 and Firewire with no problems. As soon as I can get a USB2/Firewire card installed in my wife's PC I'll be using this drive with 2 PC's to share the downloaded video.
Rating: 
Summary: Quite a useful device
Review: The drive includes both firewire and usb cables. The power brick may be considered clumsy for some, but I suppose the usb port does not supply enough power to drive the device. The included backup software is excellent (Dantz backup express). There is a 200mb version of the 5000DV (not to be confused with the 250mb 5000XT which is a 5400rpm drive instead of 7200rpm in the 5000DVs) but the price on the 120mb 5000DV seems to be more attractive than the larger drives. If both types of connections are available on your PC, I recommend using the Firewire because I feel (after some research and tests) that it is marginally faster than USB 2 in real world applications. This is a real useful device for backup and multimedia files.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent device but with restrictions...
Review: The Maxtor 5000DV 120MB external hard drive was very easy to install on my laptop using a USB 2.0 ADAPTEC CardBus adapter AUA-1420 (PCMCIA). Once the drivers were installed on my laptop, after making sure I had the last version from the Maxtor Web site, it was a matter of physically connecting the cable and going.
The disk drive comes pre-formatted from the factory with a single volume in a huge extended partition using FAT32. Since I am using Windows XP, I reformatted the disk with 2 primary partitions and a multi-volume extended partition using NTFS. This reformat process was easily accomplished with Windows XP Computer Management/Disk Management standard features. For more details see Control Panel®
Administrative Tools®Computer Management®Disk Management® Help®use the word "partition" as a search word.
I was planning on using the Maxtor disk drive to store large volume of application data as well as to store a drive image of the internal primary hard drive(C:) from which the operating system XP is running. Using the Maxtor disk drive to store and retrieve data is a smooth and very quiet working environment, which seems to me as fast as the internal disk drive, although I did not benchmark it.
The restrictions became apparent while attempting to create a drive image of internal primary hard drive C:. The restrictions are Windows related, but nevertheless curtail the use of the Maxtor disk drive. Here is what I later found from the Maxtor Knowledge Base under External Drives: a)Maxtor does not supply or support applications used to create a backup or mirror image of your internal hard drive to an external personal storage device. Microsoft offer limited support for copying the operating system from one hard disk to another within the same computer. Maxtor's 1394 and USB 2 personal storage devices are intended to copy files and applications. b)It is not possible to boot to any Windows operating systems from any USB or 1394 external drive unit. The only bootable devices that can be configured from the BIOS are SCSI, IDE, Floppy or CD-ROM. c)Currently there are no DOS drivers for USB or 1394 devices. USB or 1394 devices will not function under DOS because this technology can only operate in a "Plug-and-Play" operating systems environment. Backup software that creates images, such as Norton Ghost or PowerQuest Drive Image, requires that a device is able to function under MS-DOS. USB and 1394 drives will not function under MS-DOS because there are no MS-DOS drivers. So, if you are planning to create operating system drive images, you will need to run your image software from a second copy of your operating system installed in a different partition on your internal primary disk. This way you will be able to run your drive image software in normal Windows mode from the second partition and your primary partition will be considered data with all files closed. The workaround used by the above mentioned image software to make sure all files are closed before creating the drive image is to re-boot your system and execute in boot-mode(MS-DOS). The image software gives you the option to run in normal Windows mode if the image source is from a different partition from which it is running. You will be facing the same problem if you attempt to install a second copy of your operating system on the Maxtor disk drive. In my case, Windows XP Setup Program could not complete the installation task since it also runs in MS-DOS. Dantz Retrospect Express software is included with the Maxtor disk drive. I had to spend more than an hour reading and browsing through the 275-page+ manual before I had the feeling of making an intelligent use of the product. Retrospect appears to be a comprehensive backup environment with an easy user interface. My usage of the product is too limited to offer a serious evaluation.
Rating:
Summary: Pure, perfect, complete
Review: This is the very BEST consumer grade external disk drive on the market as of today. What a cool drive and great ability to create a wide range of backup scripts using the included Retrospect Express software. The One Touch feature on the drive saves the hastle of waiting for scheduled or manual backups; just hit the button on the front of the drive and get very quick incremental backups of the file/volume, which is very critical if you work with data intensive business applications. Setup was too easy-I kept re-reading the installation instructions thinking I had missed some steps (IE. formatting, etc.). This new drive has finally given me the peace of mind of knowing that if I have catastrophic failure of either the OPSYS or DATA files on my pc, I can restore them all with ease.
Rating: 
Summary: Buy the new 160GB 5000DV!
Review: This one is an obsolete from Maxtor.
It has only 2MB buffer memory.
Don't buy it!
Buy the new 160GB 5000DV with 8MB buffer memory!
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