An external hard drive died the other day. Fortunately, it was my backup drive, so I didn’t lose anything. And, boy, did I learn something. You turn your back on the tech business for a few months and everything’s different — smaller, faster, cheaper, more capacious.

So here’s a drive that I think I’ll be getting my hands on next: The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini, which you can buy for a hundred dollars or less, if you’re shopping carefully.

These come in sizes 320 gigabytes, 250 gigabytes and 160 gigabytes. They plug in via USB cable. But best, the Mini is small, about five inches by three inches by half an inch. It weighs about six ounces. That makes it highly portable.

It’s embedded in a steel case, which means it’ll probably weather the dings and “damn!s” of a mobile life fairly well. The interface on these OneTouch devices is simple. You plug the thing into the machine that you want to keep backed up, and you push the button the front to make it do its thing. There isn’t much configuring you can do. Also, if you’re accustomed to backing up multiple computers to the same external drive, you’ll have to change your practices — the OneTouch only works on a single computer.

Reviewers seem to mostly like it. Geoff08emd writes, “Maxtor has set the bar higher for ultra portable drive. The size is unbeatable. Also the past experience with Maxtor won my trust at its mini products. Very reliable and handy backup tool.”

Sokoloff sees some real advantages to the drive, even though he or she found it slightly more expensive than some of the competition: “First, it is bundled with disaster recovery software as well as the usual backup file software that works [on] both with XP and Vista. For those of you using Macs, while the drive will work, the software is not Apple compatible. For those of us not fortunate enough to be using Vista Business or Ultimate, the imaging capabilities are not built in and we all need to look for alternate disaster plans (such as Ghost, Acronis or some other third party software). Second, the unit is made from aluminum like metal and rubber and seems to be quite small and sturdy.”

Several reviewers like the fact that the warranty lasts for five years, a veritable lifetime when it comes to computer components.

I tell you, not since Apple introduced its iPod have storage drives been so cool!

Posted on September 18th, 2008 by dian