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.

Vantage Apparel Style# 1835 Polynosic Herringbone Shirt

Polynosic material is a highly-refined long-fiber blend of polyester and high wet modulus rayon viscose (aka HWM Rayon, known for it's high strength when wet) with a silky feel and luster that is popular in high-end clothing, bedding and even a flexible insulator for electrical cables. It wicks moisture from the wearer, giving it a nice cool feeling on the skin. It's machine washable, resisting color fading, shrinking and wrinkles - and is generally cheaper than real silk.

I have one polynosic long-sleeve oxford that I almost never wear, since there's a lot of dirty work among all my duties... But, without a doubt, it is one of the most comfortable dress shirts I own. It takes embroidery reasonably well, for such a supple material. Only a handful of my suppliers have polynosic shirts, but they're starting to catch on in popularity and are showing up in more and more department stores.

Quick polynosic care tip: To further prevent wrinkles (they already go a good job), machine wash cold with just a little detergent. Then lightly dry for 30~40 minutes (depending on dryer) until they are only slightly damp, then hang to dry. In general, I do this with all my office shirts, and they retain their colorfastness, resist shrinking and don't require ironing like they did before I started washing like this.

It's been almost a full day now, since loading the official release of Firefox 3 on my laptop (Vista Home Premium) and office desktop (Win2000). All of my webpage designs are rendering exactly how I want them, with a few bonuses that previously only worked in IE and Opera. As well, all of the pages I frequently visit are rendering perfectly.

2/3rds of the extensions I had loaded are still supported by Firefox 3. The ones that aren't supported were discontinued because 3.0 natively supports those features - with the exception of "Copy Plain Text." Hopefully that'll be updated, soon, as I hate copying text formatting. The improved Zoom feature works great, too. I've also noticed that after a whole day of regular browsing, Firefox 3.0 isn't hogging up as much memory as the previous version did. I usually had to reset Firefox a few times during the day, but so far I haven't had to reset once. I was also pleasantly surprised how easy it was to migrate over my bookmarks, quick search and settings. Actually, it did most of the work for me (I only had to import bookmarks from my backup).

I've got my fingers crossed that Firefox 3.0 continues to work well. It's rare that I upgrade hardware or software upon release, since I often like to wait until the first few patches and updates roll out, but Firefox 3.0 really sounded good.

Also, in other news, I managed to crash my new Vista Home Premium laptop for the first time... Whodunit? I had to use Internet Explorer 7 to test a new design. While testing, I followed a link to a friend's DevArt page, and BAM!! ...the screen flickered, and the system froze. I had to hard-power off the system. That strengthens my resolve to almost NEVER use Internet Explorer ever again, unless otherwise forced to.