Digital Trends

Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini (160GB)

September 27th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

More Testing:

The final tab is labeled Security, and lets you password-protect the drive and set up a 256-bit AES encrypted folder for “private” documents. You just make a password, type it in and the folder pops up. Drag stuff into it to encrypt it, and drag stuff out of it to decrypt it. It works beautifully, and we had no issues whatsoever.

You can create an encrypted folder on the drive to hide your “work documents.”

As far as speed goes, it’s a 5400rpm drive with an 8MB buffer, so don’t expect any wonders. However, it was fast enough for our needs. We transferred a 740MB file in a scant 0:27, and a 1.84GB file in 1:06, which is fast enough to satisfy our need, our need for speed.

Conclusion:

Maxtor has hit it out of the park with the One Touch 4 Mini as far as we’re concerned. It’s easy to stick a notebook hard drive into a chassis, but it’s much more difficult to create intuitive, useful backup and security software to go with it. The Maxtor Manager software is the best suite we’ve ever seen for an external drive, and we give Maxtor (Seagate) maximum kudos for a job well done. 


Pros:

• Small
• Fast
• Fantastic software package

Cons:

• No syncing between XP and Vista
• No boot disc ISO on the drive