Rating: 
Summary: A real lemon.
Review: Like many others here, my drive performed quickly & quietly, but only for 4 months. Then it tanked, taking 80G or so with it. It was neither dropped, abused, refurbished or bought from a "disreputable" retailer. Moreover, I've done a bit of research & found my experience repeated ad nauseum by dozens of others who have bought this drive. In fact, seems I was lucky to get 4 months out of it; many haven't even made it that long. What's more, Maxtor didn't even ask me for any details before authorizing the return, which leads me to believe they're well aware of what a dog this drive is. My guess is they've made it so quiet by shortchanging the cooling of the drive. Before it failed, the case would get so hot you couldn't touch it. Sad really, as until this, Maxtor drives had always performed well in my experience. The replacement drive is still OK, but I've since bought a DVD burner for backing it up, as I've no faith this one will last either. Back to Seagate, I guess.
Rating:
Summary: Listen to the people that complain about the clicking!!
Review: Please read other reviews and pay attention to how many talk about the drive making a clicking noise and then dying. Mine did the same thing. I thought, "no problem, I'll call customer service!" My guess is ALOT of people are calling customer serivice. I called 3 times. Each time as soon as I told them about the clicking it was VERY obvious they got annoyed and didn't want to talk to me anymore. PLEASE don't buy this drive! Learn from others experiances!! I'm sure a very few have won the lottery and received a drive they had no problem with. Do YOU feel lucky??
Rating:
Summary: Unreliable pieces of electronic crap
Review: Purchased 1 unit for one-touch backup capability. It failed roughly 7 months, and won't mount. Got replacement drive, it failed after 6 months. Meanwhile other drives with similar features (except one touch) from other manufacturers continue to run without any problems. I think you can find better drives from another source.
Rating: 
Summary: Quite a useful device, but consider also the 120mb version.
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 also a 120mb version of the 5000DV (which is also a 7200rpm drive but comes with a 2mb cache instead of 8mb here). Unless you take the position that larger is better, it's probably more efficient to go with the 120mb version. Also 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: Very good drive - easy backups
Review: Works as advertised. I connected it to an XP/Pro machine and formatted to NTFS in just a few minutes. Runs fast and quiet although the case gets hot.
Software and backup button work fine.
I strongly recommend connecting this to USB 2, rather than Firewire if you are using it for backups.
If you need to go into "Safe Mode" to fix problems you will find that the system recognizes USB drives but not Firewire drives. But I don't know if it would recognize a "new" USB device in Safe Mode; so connect to USB 2 in the first place. In theory it would run on USB 1.1, but what it would really do is crawl, and the odds are it would fail to copy files correctly. I tried some USB 1.1 drives and returned them all.
I recommend this drive.
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