Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy Maxtor!
Review: I bought three external drives in the last year and two died within the last 3 months. Avoid these drives if you want reliable backup.
Rating: 
Summary: works well and sets up easily
Review: I had the drive up and running on a PC running XP within 10 minutes. One note: for some reason, the drivers that automatically install from the CD are not 'certified' by Microsoft as able to run with XP, so the drive will not work until you install the appropriate drivers. However, this is not a big deal as those drivers are on the CD. So, you have to be able to find the drivers (which the instructions cite by name) on the CD and transfer them to your hard drive. Hardly seems to be a terrible thing (though, again, it's unclear why this is the case). Addtionally, if you have a FireWire port on your PC I would highly recommend using it as opposed to the USB 2.0 port, as I was getting data transfer rates of up to a quarter gigabyte per minute through Fire Wire (sustained rates averaged about 75 mb per minute).All in all a pretty impressive piece of engineering. The drive is also very quiet.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of my time/money/sanity
Review: I had this drive for a couple months when it suddenly died in the middle of an operation. All data was lost. Now I have to find a replacement drive and re-do everything I've worked on. Thanks, Maxtor!
Rating:
Summary: Went bad after a few days
Review: I hate to give anything so bad rating but just cannot help that with this drive. Sorry, Maxtor. But I have to be honest. The drive sounds like a great deal: Less than $250 for a 160 GB external hard-drive with USB/Firewire and all cables included. And it would be a GREAT deal if you get a drive which actually works after a few days. I was not the lucky one. Summary: Got it from Amazon. Hooked it up using the Firewire cable to my HP running XP Pro. I did the "drivers only" installation and XP installed it fine. I even did some backups and it was a breeze. Then after a few hours I noticed that it wasn't 'whisper-quiet' as the box label says. It was actually annoyingly noisy. I decided to unplug it and look into it later. A few days later, realizing that I was still under Amazon's 30-day return warranty and to make sure the drive ain't bad, I decided to fully test it. Plugged it back and now XP detected the drive fine but it won't show with a Drive Letter in "My Computer". Plugging it in and out, Powering it on and off, as per Maxtor's instructions did not help. I tried the USB connection too but this time it was even worse: The noise from the drive was louder. And the computer did not recognize the USB interface at all. I called Maxtor. The Tech. Support guy heard the drive on the phone (!) and quickly concluded that it was a "bad" drive as it was not supposed to make the noise and he could not help me troubleshoot it. His solution: Replace the drive. I would have to pay for shipping the bad drive to them and for the replacement drive--that could have added another $30-40 to the price I had already paid to Amazon. Amazon has kindly let me ship the drive back to them for FREE! Thanks so much. Oh, yeah: The Dantz Express is not very intuitive for backups--not that I ever got to that stage anyway. May be you will get lucky and get a good drive, unlike me and some others here. But please test it thoroughly by running it round-the-clock for at least a week before you decide to keep it. It would have been a great deal for me if it had worked. Good luck.
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: It could have been five stars
Review: I have this drive for a few months and original impression was very positive. Installation was very easy, the use is very intuitive, etc. I am glad I didn't write review at that time. The reason is that my drive failed. It indicated that there is I/O error and although the drive was recognized by the system it didn't work. Well, I understand that everything can happen and just because my drive failed it doesn't necessarily mean that something wrong with the product in general. Roughly at the same time when I purchased this unit for home we bought three drives for work. Two of these three drives failed (with the same symptoms). To the benefit of Maxtor I should say that the replacement procedure was quite smooth and organized (but that could be because they have so much experience replacing faulty units). Anyway, when three out of four units fail something is definitely wrong. Two stars just because I still liked the unit (when it worked)
Rating:
Summary: Great External Drive
Review: I have two of these drives connected to my Win2000 computer via Firewire. I use one for near-line backups and the other for MP3 storage. I highly recommend them.
Rating:
Summary: Poor Documentation
Review: I just got this thing out of the box, and it's taken a long time to get it up and running (running Max OS X 10.2.8)--this torques me off. Part of the reason I use Macs is because you can plug and play almost everything and not have to worry about stuff like this. The documentation did not accurately describe the messages and files that were on the CD, and even after reading through all of it, I had no success. Buried in Maxtor's support website (which is different from their knowledge base site for some reason) I found the article I needed: you've got to manually force the drive to reformat under 10.2. Very poor of Maxtor not to include this little tid-bit in their documentation. I think I'm going to send this drive back after reading all the awful reviews of this thing. Maxtor, if you're listening, you've got work to do.
Rating:
Summary: Reliable, fast and quiet
Review: I purchased this drive from Amazon in July as a backup for my "desktop-replacement" notebook computer. Installation was a snap. Simply unpack the drive, plug in the power and firewire cables and my notebook (running Windows XP) did the rest. My only problem was the lack of a 4-to-6 pin firewire cable for my laptop. But on advice of other reviewers I ordered a cheap cable for $6 online and was ready to go. I don't use the bundled backup software as it's often easier to just drag and drop with Windows Explorer. The sweetest plus of this drive are the two firewire ports on the back. After a reformat to NTFS to allow files larger than 4gb, I daisy-chained a firewire miniDV camcorder to the drive and began capturing and editing video. Connected to firewire, this drive supports the power save features of XP. My system automatically shuts down (i.e. spins down) the drive after 5 minutes of non-use and when entering hibernation. My future plans are to add a firewire DVD burner to the chain. One tip, plug this drive into a UPS to avoid a crash during a sudden power outage. With a notebook on battery and this drive on an APC UPS, I don't wrry about the power suddenly cutting out during file transfer.
Rating:
Summary: Reliable, fast and quiet
Review: I purchased this drive from Amazon in July as a backup for my "desktop-replacement" notebook computer. Installation was a snap. Simply unpack the drive, plug in the power and firewire cables and my notebook (running Windows XP) did the rest. My only problem was the lack of a 4-to-6 pin firewire cable for my laptop. But on advice of other reviewers I ordered a cheap cable for $6 online and was ready to go. I don't use the bundled backup software as it's often easier to just drag and drop with Windows Explorer. The sweetest plus of this drive are the two firewire ports on the back. After a reformat to NTFS to allow files larger than 4gb, I daisy-chained a firewire miniDV camcorder to the drive and began capturing and editing video. Connected to firewire, this drive supports the power save features of XP. My system automatically shuts down (i.e. spins down) the drive after 5 minutes of non-use and when entering hibernation. My future plans are to add a firewire DVD burner to the chain. One tip, plug this drive into a UPS to avoid a crash during a sudden power outage. With a notebook on battery and this drive on an APC UPS, I don't wrry about the power suddenly cutting out during file transfer.
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