Maxtor One Touch 4 750GB USB Drive - on Mac and Linux - a review

As always, I needed more drive space, so I took a look at what was available and it seems like the best price per gig is now the 750GB drive. I thought I’d just buy a SATA drive and drop it in my Linux box and share it to the network. Prices were pretty similar on all the internals, but the Maxtor one touch stood out - it was a drive in the case at the same price as the internal drives. I thought ‘What the hell’ and ordered it.

Initial impressions - small enough, kind of ugly. Has a button on the front with an indicator LED. The LED is WAY TOO BRIGHT. It would be really annoying on your desk. I’d cover it up with tape, but it might interfere with the button (although with time machine, I won’t use the button).

I thought I’d plug it into the USB port on my Airport Extreme base station and use it as a network backup for Time Machine. The drive arrived and I connected it to my iMac… it mounted fine.. I plugged it into the base station and no go. The NTFS file format wasn’t supported. So I connect it to the Mac and pop up disk utility to make it Mac format… no go. Format failed. Original partition now gone.

So I format as FAT 32… plug it into Airport Extreme. It seems to work… for about 10 minutes. For some reason the airport and or the drive seem to disappear randomly.

So I installed the mac software the drive came with (having copied it off earlier) but the Maxtor software can’t find the drive.

So back to my iMac and Vmware fusion. I format the drive as NTFS again, install the software and from Windows I can see the drive in the maxtor software and change things like the energy saver settings. But its still NTFS, and I don’t want to install MacFuse to get it working.

Over to my Linux machine. I plug the drive into my Ubuntu Box. NTFS not writable again. I format as FAT32. Seems to work fine. I copy a 4.5 Gig file over to the drive…. Damn… the 4 gig limit of FAT32. Ubuntu didnt’ even mention it, it just seemed to copy.

So, I go into the terminal, format it as ext3, put a line in the fstab to mount on the desktop. Reboot…. 30 minutes later the computer restarts… I could ping it, but I couldn’t SSH in, nothing on the screen so I’m not sure what it is doing. Drive LED goes into what looks like the sleep pattern on the MacBookPro… screen still blank. Is it doing fsck? WTF? So after about 40 minutes I reboot… machine doesn’t come back up. I unplug drive and reboot. Damn… no reboot!

So I try to format as HFS for mac… oh, drive utility doesn’t allow this… Have to go into terminal and do it… not too fun.

Overall, its very noisy, but it works so far for Time machine