MAXTOR E01G300 OneTouch II 300GB External Hard Drive

Rating:
Summary: Dual use Linux boot / Windows XP backup
Review: Goals
1. Have a drive that could be easily be moved between Linux systems for large data transfer.
2. Provide a dual boot capability for Linux/XP without touching my existing NTFS system drive
3. Provide a shared FAT partition that could be used both to move data between the two environments.
4. Backups of the XP system.

Procedure
1. Drive installed on XP without difficulty (USB2) and drive was immediately available.
2. Rebooted from a 2nd IDE drive (moved IDE cable) that had a working Linux installation.
3. I repartitioned Onetouch drive using Linux fdisk with one DOS partition.
4. Transferred Linux installation to drive using rsync
5. Followed procedure given in various usergroup postings (Maxtor provides no support for Linux). Installed 2 stage boot loader (Grub) onto Onetouch drive
6. Removed Linux IDE drive and replace XP IDE drive.
7. System wouldn't boot Linux properly. Turned out that Grub polling of the hard disk order doesn't correctly anticipate the situation when you use the flash USB boot option in the bios. Easily fixed by changing grub.conf manually.
8. Dimension 4600 has bias support for a flash USB drive and by just selecting that option from the boot menu the Maxtor now booted Linux from Onetouch without a problem. Using the standard IDE boot gave me the existing Windows XP install
9. Found I couldn't access the FAT partition (this is probably and XP issue). Had to create a smaller 32Gig partition and format it in Windows to make it accessible.
10. FAT Partition now visible to both OSs.

Comments (in no particular order)
1. Stylish design
2 Drive is warm to the touch (unless in standby). I would imagine mounting it vertically on the supplied base is important for good cooling. I have found if I run the drive steadily for a few hours (e.g. a massive file transfer) it gets warmer.
3. Works as advertised so far
4. Dual boot for Linux went very well
5. Near silent until accessed, drive noise not excessive
6. With only a few hours work, it met all my expectations so can't really ask more than that.
7. Can't comment on reliability (haven't had it long enough)
8. Includes both Firewire and USB2 cables
9. Can't comment on the quality of the bundled software as I haven't used it.
10. When used on the Linux ext3 filesystem it achieved somewhere between 50% and 75% of the speed of a high performance internal IDE. This is likely OS dependent.

I appreciate this is not a mainstream use but thought there might be someone out there trying to do something similar. I don't often feel this positive about a product hence taking the time to write a review.

Rating:
Summary: After Installation It was Great
Review: I can't say this installation went smoothly. It stopped at some point (this was even intentionally not installing the retrospect(?) software that is used for backups).
I was able to find it in explorer and started copying files only to find out the next morning after restarting computer and drive that xp Disk Management wanted it formatted. Must have been the step that wasn't done during installation. So I have to wipe off some files and format. Then fine.

After you believe it is installed, just to insure press start; right click MY Computer and select Manage. In there your external drive should be recognized by name (of course, you need to have it connected to pc).

Rating:
Summary: NICE AND QUIET BACK UP
Review: So far so good. It is fairly quiet compared to my Western Digital 120. I was a little disappointed in the fact that it only has 279GB. Hopefully it will hold everything I have and download for another year. I also caught mine on sale for 299.00