Date: July 29, 2008 - Author: Rory Buszka
Maxtor's diminutive OneTouch 4 Mini pushes the capacity envelope again, packing a positively huge 320 gigabytes of storage into a tiny enclosure. It's also one of the sexiest mini external drives we've seen. Is the OneTouch 4 Mini 320GB a portable storage slam-dunk?
Flash media rocked the external storage world when it first arrived in 2000, sending the floppy diskette and other popular removable storage systems packing for good. USB flash drives are both reliable and incredibly convenient, able to hang from a keychain or nestle comfortably in a pocket. (Try doing that with a floppy diskette, if you can still find one, and you'll be branded a nerd for life once anybody sees you.)
However, flash media still falls short of the traditional mechanical hard drive when it comes to delivering massive storage capacities in small spaces. A flash drive currently tops out at 32 gigabytes, but external hard drive capacities push well past five terabytes.
The problem with many external hard drives is that while they can easily be disconnected and transported from one machine to another, most still rely on an external power source, since they consume copious amounts of power when compared to flash storage. A minor inconvenience, yes, but it can become a serious problem if you need to access the contents of the hard drive if there's no additional power source nearby.
To remedy this, drive manufacturers are turning to power-sipping 2.5" notebook hard drives, which can usually spin up and operate on just the power supplied by a typical USB 1.1 or 2.0 port. This has given rise to a range of "mini" drive offerings from various external drive makers that only require one connection to function - usually a mini USB port.
Maxtor has offered a 'mini' version of their popular OneTouch drives since the OneTouch III series, based on the company's 2.5" drive products. With the OneTouch 4 series, Maxtor has given the entire series a face-lift, and upped the range of available capacities to 320 gigabytes. Like their larger brothers, the OneTouch Mini external drives feature a large, illuminated button on the front of the drive that activates a user-definable backup routine via the drive's software.
In this article, we'll be taking a look at Maxtor's largest OneTouch 4 Mini hard drive, the capacious 320 gigabyte model. It's got enough space to store a complete system backup of most laptop hard drives, it's small enough to pack easily in most laptop carrying cases, and it's got that secret-agent cool-factor that comes from being able to slip 320 gigabytes of data into your pocket.
The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini comes in a PET clamshell package that attractively displays the drive and its features. One concern with the packaging is that there's no non-destructive way to get the two halves of the clamshell apart. Once you've got it open, you'll have difficulty returning the drive to its place of purchase, since it'll need to be sent back to the manufacturer for re-packaging before it can be sold again. We'd have preferred to see a re-closable clamshell package, or a small carton.
Inside the OneTouch 4 Mini's package, here's what you get: the drive itself, a USB Y-cable (with an additional connector that's just for power, in case one connector isn't enough for reliable operation), a bootable CD that allows you to restore system data directly from the drive, and a folded yellow sheet with additional quick-start instructions for users of Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) or above. Also included in the recovery CD envelope is a small instruction guide for setting up the OneTouch 4 Mini.
Through experimentation, we discovered that all the machines we had on hand (including a two-year-old laptop) supplied enough power on each USB port that only the single 'data' connector on the USB Y-cable was required for reliable operation. Still, we recommend that you use both connectors whenever possible, and experiment with a single connector only during data transfers that aren't of mission-critical importance, as drive performance may be erratic if sufficient power isn't supplied. For all testing, both power connectors were used.
The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini features a simple yet stylish exterior design, with a single button along its front edge that's illuminated from behind by the drive's white status LED. The top of the drive has a brushed aluminum look, but the material itself is actually silver plastic with a brushed texture. The Maxtor logo is boldly silkscreened near the bottom of the drive - the overall aesthetic is not unlike the OneTouch 4 Ultra drives, though it's far less 'chunky'.
To give you an idea of the OneTouch 4 Mini's physical size, its housing is even smaller and slimmer than a typical 3.5" hard drive. It's about as physically long as a stick of memory, and its rounded corners make it easy to slip into your bag of tricks. It'll also fit easily into the front pocket of your jeans, which may prompt your friends to ask, "Is that 320GB in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"
The only port on the exterior of the OneTouch 4 Mini is a single Mini USB port that supplies both the data connection and power to the drive itself. Obviously, this simplifies the task of connecting the drive somewhat. USB 2.0 wins out as the sole protocol here, since IEEE 1394 (Firewire 400) isn't nearly as ubiquitous, and the USB cable is capable of providing power as well. That's something that eSATA cannot provide at present.
Now that we've taken a look at the Maxtor OneTouch from the outside, let's check out the included software.
Maxtor's OneTouch 4 Mini drive differentiates itself from its competition by a large, illuminated button on the drive's front edge, which launches a variety of user-defined backup routines with a single press. However, to make this happen, you'll need to make sure the drive's included software bundle is installed on your PC. Here's a brief overview of the software's features.
Upon connecting the drive for the first time, you'll be allowed to install the drive's software. The autorun application also allows you to access an electronic version of the drive's instruction manual, or register the drive with Maxtor. This is just a good idea - it helps streamline your service experience in the case that you need to send your drive in for warranty repair or replacement.
After restarting your system at the conclusion of the software installer, you'll see an "M" icon in your system tray. This icon indicates the status of the drive. If an error occurred during the last scheduled backup run, a red icon will be displayed. But if everything's fine, the icon will be green, like shown here. You can also access the Maxtor Manager software by double-clicking or right-clicking the icon. If you mouse over the icon, a balloon will pop up, displaying the connected OneTouch devices, which can become annoying sometimes, but the notification can't be disabled.
The main screen of the Maxtor Manager software provides access to the various backup and file synchronization functionality that can be mapped to the OneTouch button. The main page also displays all Maxtor OneTouch drives attached to the system and provides access to the settings pages. The list only lists Maxtor OneTouch devices attached to the system; a Seagate FreeAgent Pro drive connected to the system was not listed, even though both drives are made by Seagate, and the software for both drives is similar.
On the "Backup" page of the control program, you can set up a variety of different backup schemes. The "Simple Backup" option backup simply schedules a daily backup of your My Documents folder, while the "Custom Backup" lets you choose folders and individual files to back up, as well as specific files and folders to exclude from the backup plan.
The "Sync" page of the control program lets you set up your drive to automatically synchronize files between your host PC and your OneTouch drive. This makes it simple to keep up-to-date versions of your files on the OneTouch drive, without needing to keep the drive plugged into your PC. As before, you can select specific files and folders to include or exclude.
The Maxtor Manager software provided with the OneTouch 4 Mini includes a function called "SafetyDrill", which uses a preset amount of space on the drive to copy your entire machine's hard drive over to the OneTouch drive. Of course, if your PC has a hard drive larger than the capacity of the OneTouch Mini, you won't be able to copy your entire hard drive to the OneTouch drive, which may limit its usefulness for many well-equipped desktop machines (where hard drives in excess of 500GB are common).
The Maxtor Manager software provides two options for securing the data on the OneTouch 4 Mini. DrivePass sets a password over the entire drive, which must be entered before the drive's data will be available to the PC. Maxtor Encryption creates a hidden, encrypted folder on the drive that can only be decrypted using the Maxtor Encryption Tool (also copied to the drive), using a password you set. This doesn't go quite as far as the new Maxtor BlackArmor drive's full-drive, hardware-based AES encryption, but it's certainly enough to keep things like financial data secure.
The settings page for the Maxtor OneTouch drive allows you to customize the function activated by the OneTouch button on the front of the drive, as well as adjust the time interval before the drive spins down automatically to conserve power and extend the drive's life. The OneTouch button can be configured to automatically execute a backup plan, or synchronize the files you've selected on the "Sync" page of the program. Alternately, you can configure the button to launch an application on either the drive or the host PC.
One final note: Windows automatically enables write caching on external hard drives, identifying them as fixed disks instead of external devices. Write caching improves hard drive performance by delaying certain 'write' operations and executing them during idle time. However, this can cause data corruption if the drive is unplugged before the "Safely Remove Hardware" command is chosen.
To change this, right-click on the external hard drive icon and select "Properties". Under the "Hardware" tab, select the external drive you wish to reconfigure, and click the "Properties" button at the bottom of the dialog. This will bring up the Device Manager page for that drive. In the dialog that appears, choose the "Policies" tab, and select the "Optimize for Quick Removal" option. This will only have a slight impact on performance, and only if you launch storage-intensive applications directly from the drive. (Note: for our performance testing, write caching was enabled.)
Now that we've taken a detailed look at the included software package, it's on to our performance testing and verdict.
Maxtor's OneTouch 4 Mini isn't designed to appeal to the performance crowd, being a 5400RPM drive that's further speed-limited by its USB 2.0 connection. Its primary virtue is its size, though it also offers additional convenience by not requiring an external power adapter to operate, like many 3.5" form factor drives do. For this article, we'll compare it to the powerhouse Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB, one of the best external hard drives we've tested thus far.
The testing for this article provided the perfect opportunity to break in the newest addition to our fleet of hardware test rigs, based on a 45nm Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 and running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition x64. The test machine is not connected to a network during testing, and no virus scanning, firewall, or disk optimization software is used while testing is being conducted.
To test external storage, we use Simpli Software's HD Tach to test drive throughput and random access times, and then manually test the time it takes to copy a 4GB folder from the machine's internal hard drive to each external drive under test. In this review, there's only one connection type to be worried about, so we'll only test the OneTouch 4 Mini and the Seagate FreeAgent Pro using the USB 2.0 interface, despite the FreeAgent Pro's eSATA capability.
In the synthetic HD Tach benchmark, you'll notice that the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini eked out three-megabyte-per-second lead over the FreeAgent Pro in average read performance, though both managed similar burst transfer rates. The FreeAgent Pro took a marginal lead in access time, turning the tables where random access operation is concerned.
When we conducted our real-world folder copying benchmark, however, the FreeAgent Pro pulled out a 4-second lead, as if from nowhere. The OneTouch 4 Mini was still surprisingly speedy, and is certainly in the same league as the FreeAgent when it comes to its ability to transfer large amounts of data quickly.
Maxtor pushes the capacity and value envelopes once again with the OneTouch 4 Mini, thanks to a fast 2.5" drive platform and the ability of the drive to operate independently of an external power source. The OneTouch 4 Mini provides a stylish, compelling alternative to flash-based storage when large amounts of data (like HD video or an entire music collection) need to be moved that make flash drives impractical. Yet its ability to draw all its power from the host machine's USB bus means it's the perfect storage companion to laptop PCs.
The OneTouch 4 Mini 320GB model kept up with our 750GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro in performance testing, to within an extremely small margin. And its single-button backup/sync feature makes it easy to protect your data whenever you want, or ensure that your files are up-to-date, though we see more usefulness in programming the OneTouch button to sync files, and simply letting the backup routine run automatically.
Our initial enthusiasm for the drive was somewhat damped by the fact that we had to request a second sample from Maxtor after our initial sample fell victim to USB controller issues. After about five minutes, our first drive would simply stop transmitting data to the host machine, and the drive's custom icon would be replaced by a generic fixed-disk icon. Our second sample worked flawlessly through all testing, but all the same, it's still disconcerting to ever receive a product sample that's a dud.
Our issue appears to have been an isolated one, thankfully, and the replacement drive didn't suffer from the same problem. The OneTouch 4 Mini carries the same 5-year limited warranty as the other OneTouch products, so you'll be well cared-for if you should experience a similar issue with your drive. However, be aware that there is a fee for data recovery, even with warranty service. Depending on how much that turns out to be, you might be better off prying the case open and liberating the drive inside, then plugging it directly into a PC to recover the data.
The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 320GB is a great-looking 2.5" form factor external drive that offers excellent performance and flexibility, and plenty of available storage capacity as well. We're in love with the product concept, but the sketchy USB connection in the first test sample we received nevertheless introduces some uncertainty. For that reason, we're only awarding the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 320GB a Techgage score of 8/10.
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