Although I have owned a number of external hard drives, I am quite impressed with the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini. Although it is not the most economical storage system, it is attractive, portable, and requires no external power source. Although I don’t use it for the cold storage purposes I might use another external hard drive for, the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini does nicely as a backup drive.
The chief advantage of the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini is its small profile. Contained in the reasonably attractive rubber box that all Maxtor hard drives use, the OneTouch III Mini is quite small. Rather than occupying a corner of your desk, sending wires trailing over the side, it can fit in your hand, go in your bag, or be stashed away in a drawer when not in use. Also, deriving all its power from its USB cord, it requires no bulky and annoying AC adapter. (Laptop users should be advised that this feature, while convenient, means that you battery won’t last long with the OneTouch III Mini) The whole apparatus is sturdy enough to travel with, as was the original intention, but watch out! Hard drives are intricate devices, which have moving parts and often contain information that their owner would be rather annoyed to lose. Although the portable design is something of an invitation to whack the thing around a bit, don’t. Mine hasn’t broken yet, but my past experience with laptops and mp3 players gives me reason to believe that it might not do so well. (A bit of research reveals that Maxtor offers hard drive case for $15-look for it on Amazon)
In addition to being small and attractive, the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini comes with backup software, which can back up either everything on your computer or a few select files, and can also be used to synchronize two computers together. Combined with its portability, this has proved to be quite useful. Although I have no need to synchronize computers at home and at work, I have found it quite helpful in shuffling gigantic files around the house.
My one disappointment with this drive is the price for so little storage. Costing $150, the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini is about the price of any external hard drive, but only offers 160 GB storage, up against hard drives that hold 250 or 360. While 160 GB may be a lot of storage for some, it will fill up quickly if you use it to hold large files like movies. Depending on how big you computer’s hard drive is, it may not even be big enough to hold everything on it. Buy a cheaper drive if you are looking for lots of storage. Although it would be nice if this drive were available in a larger size, its portability makes it nice for many purposes.
