Peter Staack Product Testimonials & Reviews

I received a Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition 160GB USB 2.0 portable hard drive, featuring a 2.5" disk, on my birthday a while back. My dad managed to get a pair of them (one for him, one for me) for a pretty good deal. While I already have several portable hard drives, including a very high-end SCSI portable and several mid-to-high-range 3.5" disk-based USB 2.0 / FireWire / eSATA drives, this tiny Maxtor has quickly become my favorite portable drive.

My other "portable" drives are really just external drives that I -could- move around, but don't. They're big, they're heavy, most are fragile (since the drives inside were intended to mounted in a PC case), and they require an external power supply. Each one of the wall-warts weigh as much as the disk itself, and as luck would have it, the power for all of my computers are hard to access. Generally, I use them for archival storage or redundant backup (I keep them in a fire safe, when not in use), but avoid moving them around any more than necessary.

The Maxtor OneTouch III Mini is small, lightweight, and - best of all - doesn't require an external power supply. It draws all the necessary power from USB, which is great! The whole package fits perfectly in a spare impact-resistant 5m waterproof clamshell carrying case I had sitting around, so I can carry it around anywhere I damn well please. The 2.5" disk inside is a hearty notebook drive, so it's more resistant to shock (even though I'm very careful the drive, it makes me feel better knowing). It runs cooler than any of my other external drives, and doesn't require a fan. It quickly and effortlessly mounts on all of my Windows 2000, NT 4 (with hacked USB drivers), and XP Pro workstations and our RHEL ES server. Vista and MacOS X had no problems either, mounting them in seconds.

Out of the box, it performed pretty good against comparably priced 2.5" portable drives. After tweaking it, the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini runs circles around my boss' Ultra Disk2Go drive. I mean, it kicks the dirt out of it in benchmark tests!

I reformatted it as NTFS, I upped the cluster size to 32Kb (I don't save many small files to it), I slightly increased the size of the MFT (Master File Table), I moved the MFT back on the disk to give it more room to expand, I disabled short file names, I disabled "last accessed" writing, native NTFS compression was disabled by the new cluster size (which is fine, since I rely on WinRAR with PAR2 parity files for safe and effective compression), I disabled file indexing, and I defragment the drive with PerfectDisk 8.0 as needed (though PD needs an update to defrag cluster sizes larger than 4Kb).

Property tweaked, I get sequential read/write speeds near my top-of-the-line external hard disk drive. Random read/writes are respectable, and only slightly slower than the 3.5" disks - but most of my operations are moving large WinRAR archives, so it's a non-issue. It's plenty fast that I could run simple apps from it (though I don't), stream media from it, and I can run real-time Triple-DES and AES-Twofish-Serpent encryption on it using the wonderful (and free) TrueCrypt encryption application.

I haven't tried the pack-in software... Honestly, I never use pack-in software. There's almost always a better 3rd party application out there (frequently for free). Still, from the reviews I've read, the pack-in software does work as advertised.

Even at regular store prices, cost-per-gigabyte, the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini is pretty reasonable. It costs much less per GB than higher-end 2.5" drives, with comparable speeds, and significantly less than large T1 non-volatile flash memory drives. It's a few pennies more expensive per GB than the 3.5" drives, but makes up for it by being far smaller and more easily portable, without the need for a fan or having to carry a bulky external power supply. In short, the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini is everything I want in a portable hard drive, and I use it daily.