Digital Trends

Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini (160GB) September 27th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Features and Design

The Maxtor OneTouch line has been around for awhile now, both in its external drive form and the “mini” versions, which are portable USB 2.0 drives. The company has revamped the series and launched the OneTouch 4 Mini with all new software and a new form factor.

The new design is rather slick, as the chassis is not much bigger than the drive inside. More importantly, it’s much smaller than the previous generation drive. It’s also thinner, and fits in the palm of your hand.

The drive is like every other OneTouch drive, in that it has a single button that can be pressed to perform a pre-selected backup routine. The default backup is of “my documents,” but you can set it up to either run backup, sync folders, or open the application of your choosing.

The drive itself is packaged in a small metallic shell, with a two-headed USB cable. In most computers you should be able to get enough power from one USB port to run the drive, but older computers will require both USB cables to be plugged in.

The software package that is included, and is on the drive itself rather than a CD, is dubbed Maxtor Manager, and acts as a central hub to control everything from backups-to-syncing-to-security. It’s an amazingly full-featured package, and easily offers more options than any backup drive we’ve ever tested. You can backup certain folders on a regular schedule, sync folders between computers, password protect the drive’s contents, create an encrypted folder, and even create an image of your drive and totally restore your entire system in the case of hard drive failure. To say the software suite is great is an understatement of grand proportions.

The OneTouch Mini is available in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB and it works with Macs as well as PCs.

The OneTouch 4 Mini (on the right) is smaller in every way compared to the previous model.