Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 1TB USB/FireWire External Hard Drive
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I do a lot of work with video and audio files, meaning I often have to move many very large files around and keep them in accessible areas. I had a Seagate 300gb external hard drive to help with this, but I maxed that out. I then went out and got this Maxtor 1 terabyte drive to help me gain some more disk space easily.
My other external drive is a Seagate and it worked flawlessly and quietly - it had not occurred to me that this new Maxtor would do any differently. However, right from the start I ran into problems. Every time my computer "slept" the Maxtor drive would disconnect. When I woke my PC back up, I would literally have to unplug and replug the Maxtor drive in before it would be recognized again.
The drive can get VERY loud, to the point that it's quite annoying. Yes, I realize it's a full terabyte but to be honest I'd much rather have a few smaller drives that are quiet, vs having this constant HUMMMMMMMM in my work area.
Also, just having the Maxtor connected to my PC causes all sorts of problems. If I am in Word (or really any other application) and go to save or open a file, it will sit there whirring the external drive even though I am loading and saving from the C or D drive! It's not even "using" the Maxtor but it feels a need to power it up before it gives me my drive options. It wouldn't be bad if this was a five second operation - but sometimes I have to wait for a full, long 30 seconds to 1 minute before I get my save dialogue to wake up again. I know one minute sounds like a short period of time but when you're trying to make a quick change and go on to something else, to wait for a full minute while a not-even-being-used drive thrashes around can get quite frustrating.
The Maxtor website and forums aren't much help either. I did try to use them and really just poking around in the control panel with various sleep and power settings is what I had to do to get this even slightly functional.
I really do appreciate having the space. Having a terabyte of storage online is quite nice. But in terms of THIS drive, I wouldn't recommend it to others.
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