The aluminum housing became very hot to the touch, which made us glad that the drive was not cooped up in our already stuffy and warm computer case. Initial tests were flawless and we captured three consecutive hours of video with breaks only to change the tapes. The specs for USB 2.0 clearly show that the standard has the bandwidth to flawlessly capture 25Mbps DV video, by more than a magnitude. We began our tests capturing to the drive using the USB 2.0 connection, with our camcorder going into the FireWire port on a Creative Labs Audigy sound card. In WinXP, a Quick Format did the trick and only took a few seconds. Fortunately, it was a simple matter to reformat the drive to the NTFS file system. We understand that Maxtor used the FAT32 because it is more universal, but it is not the best for video on a PC, since this older file system forces videographers to split their video files into separate chunks. There were no fans and we could scarcely hear the crackle of the heads madly transferring data to the platters without pressing our ear to the drive housing.Īfter the connecting the drive to the USB 2.0 port, we checked out the drive and found that it was formatted using the FAT32 file system. When we powered up the drive (using the power switch), we were quite astonished with how quiet it was. The front panel sports a pair of bright blue LEDs under the OneTouch button that you may find either annoying or really cool.
The 250GB OneTouch drive we reviewed was housed in an attractive brushed aluminum case that can lay flat or stand vertically on the included plastic stand. Maxtor’s latest OneTouch external drive offers an incremental improvement over the previous version, but the price/performance/features are remarkable as a whole. Best of all, the price-per-gig is a fraction of what it once was, with some video-capable drives falling well below $1/GB after rebates. In-camera digital compression has lowered the data rate necessary for acquisition, drive technology has improved and drive sizes have increased 20 fold.
MAXTOR ONE TOUCH SOFTWARE DOWNLOAD FREE PC
Remember when $600 was a good price on a 13GB Seagate Barracuda A/V hard disk? Analog MJPEG capture rates needed 10,000 rpm drives that sounded like Everglades fan boats and were hot enough that the kids could use your PC as an Easy Bake oven when you captured video.