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Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition Review

One Terrific Terabyte

February 22, 2006
By Joseph Moran

Wed 2/22/06 -- CD and DVD burners are becoming ubiquitous and tape is still clinging to life, but external hard drives have become a popular -- if relatively pricey -- way to bolster or back up a PC's storage as easily as plugging in a USB or FireWire cable.

Most of these external cases hold only one hard disk, which limits capacity to the biggest drives available (currently 400GB or 500GB). Moreover, a single-drive design prohibits the use of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology for added protection or improved performance. Those drawbacks don't exist with Maxtor Corp.'s new OneTouch III Turbo Edition.

This $900 desk accessory sports a pair of 500GB, 7,200-rpm, 3.5-inch ATA hard disks, which add up to a whopping 1 terabyte of data space and share a 16MB cache buffer. The OneTouch III Turbo also offers a choice of RAID 0, which improves performance by striping -- reading and writing data across two disks simultaneously -- or RAID 1, which mirrors the contents of one drive onto the other for data redundancy.

You can choose among three ways to connect the Maxtor to your computer -- USB 2.0, FireWire 400, or FireWire 800, with cables for each included in the box. In spite of its copious capacity and RAID support, however, the OneTouch is meant to connect directly to a single PC; there's no Ethernet port, so the unit can't function as a network attached storage (NAS) device.

As you might expect given its bunk-bed design, the Turbo is a bit larger and heavier than other external drives. Its desk-space footprint is a reasonable 5 by 8 inches, but at 6 pounds it's more suited to rare than to regular moves from one desk to another.

Take It for a Spin

After installing Maxtor's software, we plugged the Turbo into our Windows XP Professional desktop via the FireWire 400 port and flipped the power switch. Within seconds we were prompted to format the drives (Apple fans may grumble about being vendors' second priority after Windows, but the OneTouch III comes out of the box formatted as a bootable Mac OS drive). The formatting process took two or three minutes, after which we were ready to transfer or back up files.

The Turbo doesn't initially give you the option to choose between a RAID 0 and RAID 1 configuration: Evidently believing that most users will value performance over safety, the company picked RAID 0 as the default. Maxtor may be right, but the software doesn't mention the choice at the formatting stage, so you might start filling the drives with data before realizing the unit's not configured as you'd like. You can change the OneTouch's RAID setup using Maxtor's utility software, but doing so means kissing your data goodbye (hopefully after backing it up somewhere else). We'd be happier if given the choice at startup.

Like Maxtor's previous external drives, the OneTouch III Turbo Edition comes with EMC2's Retrospect Express HD software for backing up and restoring data. The program supports either conventional backups, which save the most recent version of each file, or (for Windows only) restore points, which save multiple versions or generations of a file in case one is inadvertently changed or corrupted. You can choose to run backups at scheduled times, or start one any time with -- so to speak -- one touch of the Turbo's front-panel button. (Scheduling buffs can reassign the button to launch a chosen application.)

The drive also comes with Maxtor's OneTouch Manager utility, whose Sync feature lets you synchronize the contents of one or more folders on your PC and the Turbo for easy data mobility. It works well, though it probably makes more sense with a smaller external drive that's easier to transport.

OneTouch Manager also offers options for adjusting power management, security, and performance. For example, you can tell the device to enter a low-power mode after a defined period of inactivity (it'll still respond when accessed, albeit with a slight delay), or require a password to access the unit or change any settings.

The Turbo can operate in two performance modes -- Normal and High. The former is supposed to yield quieter operation, but we found the drive plenty quiet even at the default High setting. Unless you work in unusually hushed environs, you'll barely hear its cooling fan above the room's ambient noise.

It's Vast, But Is It Fast?

Maxtor aims the OneTouch III Turbo Edition at performance-conscious customers, particularly those who need lots of storage and speed for digital video editing and similar tasks. (The OneTouch III line also includes a 600MB RAID-enabled model as well as multiple non-RAID models with lesser capacities and fewer interface options.)

Each type of RAID comes with its own tradeoffs in terms of balancing performance and security. With RAID 0, for instance, storing a file across two drives means faster access, but means you're in trouble even if only one drive fails. RAID 1, by contrast, makes a safe backup of every file, but effectively halves your storage capacity, turning the 1TB Turbo into a 500GB drive.

To quantify the difference between RAID 0 and RAID 1 modes, we used Simpli Software's HD Tach 3 benchmark. Operating as a 500GB RAID 1 drive, the Turbo posted average read times of 36MB/sec - meaning it read data on the disc at that speed.

Reconfiguring the device for RAID 0 did improve performance, but only by about 10 percent, to 39.1MB/sec. (Your mileage may vary, because FireWire 400's bandwidth comes below FireWire 800's and just above that of USB 2.0.) Given that narrow gap, unless you need every bit of storage and speed you can get, we'd vote for the extra peace of mind that RAID 1 provides.

At $900, or even at a street price closer to $800, the OneTouch III Turbo Edition certainly isn't cheap. On the other hand, it's hard to find another external hard drive that offers its combination of storage, RAID support, and interface options, and matching its capacity by buying two or three separate external drives can easily cost more. Unless you need a NAS rather than personal storage solution, the Maxtor is a solid choice.

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