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Rating: 
Summary: Poor quality
Review: Does not operate well in OS-X. Drive is not accessable in OS-X unless Classic OS-9 is running on bootup. This means that you cannot run OS-X applications directly from the drive.The transfer rate for this drive is extremely slow when uploading digital video files directly from the camera to the drive. The drive will lockup and you will need to reboot the system to unlock the drive if you cannot unlock it by powering the drive on and off. Maxtor customer service is lacking, as well. There is no disclaimer on the box or any of their documentation on their website advising consumers about compatability problems with OS-X. They do not have any driver updates section for this drive on their website. I finally found the OS-X disclaimer after I downloaded the Software Installation file and decompressed it. This file should have been on the webpage as a notice. Maxtor makes very good products, but they really stepped on it with this one. They need to do a better job with Mac products if they want to keep their share of this market, or just do us a favor and stop producing for the Mac and save us a lot of time.
Rating:
Summary: Needs better support for OS-X
Review: Does not operate well in OS-X. Drive is not accessable in OS-X unless Classic OS-9 is running on bootup. This means that you cannot run OS-X applications directly from the drive. The transfer rate for this drive is extremely slow when uploading digital video files directly from the camera to the drive. The drive will lockup and you will need to reboot the system to unlock the drive if you cannot unlock it by powering the drive on and off. Maxtor customer service is lacking, as well. There is no disclaimer on the box or any of their documentation on their website advising consumers about compatability problems with OS-X. They do not have any driver updates section for this drive on their website. I finally found the OS-X disclaimer after I downloaded the Software Installation file and decompressed it. This file should have been on the webpage as a notice. Maxtor makes very good products, but they really stepped on it with this one. They need to do a better job with Mac products if they want to keep their share of this market, or just do us a favor and stop producing for the Mac and save us a lot of time.
Rating: 
Summary: great product for use with an iMac
Review: I have had nothing but good luck with this product since I bought it about 4 months ago. I use it for backing up my hard drive and extra video and picture storage. Easy to use and nice looking on the desktop. Highly recommend. I think I would spend the extra cash on the 80MB if I had it to do all over though.
Rating:
Summary: great product for use with an iMac
Review: I have had nothing but good luck with this product since I bought it about 4 months ago. I use it for backing up my hard drive and extra video and picture storage. Easy to use and nice looking on the desktop. Highly recommend. I think I would spend the extra cash on the 80MB if I had it to do all over though.
Rating:
Summary: Poor quality
Review: I ordered this drive 6 months ago. The drive I initially received, worked fine initially, but over a few months took longer and longer to warm up (up to 30 minutes), before the computer would recognize it. I returned it to the manufacturer. The second drive they sent me lasted for about 2 weeks, before my computer reported that it could not read from the drive at all, due to I/O errors. It seems that this drive is so unreliable, I need to keep a copy of all my files somewhere else, to be sure I don't lose anything when the drive fails.
Rating: 
Summary: Works, But Has Quirks
Review: I've had one of these for about six months. You can't beat it for portability, speed, and storage for the buck. It does have an annoying habit of locking up (part of this may be because my office is not air conditioned and the temperature fluctuates quite a bit.) Since it's FireWire, what I do when this happens is disconnect it and reconnect it. My Mac G3 just says, "You disconnected a FireWire drive. Please connect it again." When I do this, it starts working again. I've heard a few other people complain that their drives conked out on them, but Maxtor seems to be good about replacing them. I'll probably do this before the warranty expires. Be advised, by the way, that Macs prior to the G4 *cannot* be booted from FireWire, so don't think you're going to use this as a startup drive if that's what you've got. You *can* use it to hold the Classic/OS9 environment if you run OSX off your internal hard drive. OSX gets along beautifully with this drive.
Rating:
Summary: Maxtor External Hard Drives
Review: Since no one had mentioned their experience with Maxtor external drives on the PC, I thought I would add my two cents. I recently purchased the 40gb USB HD from them and it works great. Between my friends and I, we have all had nothing but instant plug and play success in Windows 98, ME, and 2000 -- which I must say is rare for PC products. They don't even include driver disks; you don't need them! I don't see why the FireWire option would be much different, assuming you have the correct ports. It's an excellent buy for so much storage space. If you don't plan on swapping much data and use it more for backups or ghosting as I do, it puts any other medium (Zip, Jaz, CD-R, Tape) to shame. Lastly, I would definitely recommend Maxtor products over Buslink, who also makes external HDs. I bought Buslink's silver portable CD-RW drive and still haven't been able to get it to work in Windows 2000 (which claimed compatibility on the box), and I have given up on their customer service after months of being no help whatsoever.
Rating:
Summary: Don't risk your data on this drive
Review: The first one of these I bought wouldn't stay alive for more than a couple of minutes between power-ups. Maxtor kept telling me it was an incompatibility with my computer and wouldn't repair it even though I had tried a different firewire card and computer. I returned the drive for another one. The next one worked more reliably until recently and now it acts like the first one I bought. Maxtor won't admit this drive has flaws!
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