Safeguarding data with Maxtor

If you are looking for a portable, high capacity storage and backup

solution, then Maxtor One Touch HDD is for you. It is a good option

especially for design professionals who work with very large file sizes, and

need to carry them around. Compliant with a Mac or PC, it can hold up to 250

GB data and has a USB 2.0 interface. 

The drive integrates a one-touch backup solution, with a button on the

drives front panel with which you can do system backup using the bundled

Retrospect backup software. This button can be customized to do automated,

timed and password protected backups. It also has a disaster recovery

feature, which enables you to use your OS’s CD and a snapshot of all the

data on the Maxtor drive to create an ISO image of a bootable CD. This is a

great way to restore your data in case the system crashes. 

We tested the drive for backing up 10 GB of regular office application

data, and for the raw data transfer rates. With the Retrospect software, it

took 55 mins to backup all 10 GB of data, with file verification and

software compression turned on. The same took only 10 mins when verification

and compression were disabled. It appears that file verification and

compression were eating up most of the time. Also, once the full backup is

done, subsequent backups only back up changes to the original data.

In the case of HDtach, the drive gave a maximum throughput of 19.38 MB

per sec, minimum of 7.28 MB per sec and an average of 18.92 MB per sec.

These were similar to the Iomega external drive that we reviewed in the last

issue. On the other hand, in the packet transfer tests, this drive gave much

better throughputs than the Iomega. These were 14.52 MB per sec while

writing to disk as against 7.4 MB per sec of the Iomega, and 20.48 MB per

sec while reading from disk, as against 14 MB per sec given by the Iomega

drive.

Also the drive has a lower cost of Rs 78 per GB as compared to Iomega’s

Rs 375 per GB. Considering the lower price, features and good performance,

the drive is a good buy.