Product Description

Designed for creative professionals who need the disk striping speed of RAID 0 for intensive disk-access applications or the security of RAID 1 for automatically mirroring data, the Maxtor OneTouch III, Turbo Edition provides an easy to use wizard interface for configuring your system for optimal performance.

Product Details

• Brand: Maxtor
• Model: C01W015
• Dimensions: 7.40" h x 8.60" w x 11.20" l, 9.00 pounds
• Hard Disk: 1500GB

Features

• 1.5 TB external hard drive connects to your computer via USB, FireWire 400 or FireWire 800
• Delivers disk stripping speed of RAID 0 for intensive disk-access applications or the security of RAID 1 for automatically mirroring data
• Supports both Mac and Windows platforms, and it arrives preformatted for the Mac and includes the 924 chipset
• Includes portable drive, software, FireWire 800 cable, FireWire 400 cable, USB 2.0 cable, external AC power supply, and quick start guide
• 1-year limited warranty

Customer Reviews

Don't do it. It's that simple!
I bought several of these RAIDS from Amazon. I bought two 1TB, one 500GB, and one 1.5TB. The 1TB RAIDS worked out of the box. Formatted to NTFS. The 1.5TB RAID set up to RAID1 started showing corruption on the file system within a week.

I deleted the partition and set it up as RAID0 striping figuring I would use on of the other 1TB RAIDS as a true backup of each other. The 1.5TB formatted to about 80% and hung for 2 days. I tried again and it hung at 80%. I tried formatting with my laptop. Same problem with the 80% stall. I used my new dual-core 3 GHz Biostar 6000 box to format via firewire. Again it stalled at 80%.

I went to the vendor and exchanged it for a new one. I went home and started the formatting fiasco again. It hung at 80% on my external DMZ box and again on my regular workstation. I returned the 1.5TB drive and opened a ticket with Maxtor anyway. From the feedback I've been getting on the ticket I'm not too confident that a solution will be forthcoming.

What I did find out while surfing the web looking for some tips on these drives is that there are many reported issues with them. First, when there is a failure, your data is gone. It seems the controllers on these are not what I would want to put critical data through. I'm reading about hard drive failures and unsuccessful attempts at users trying to recover their data at the cost of losing the warrantee.

Maxtor put an HPA area on the drives that cripples attempts to use a replacement drive. No reason for this from what I can see other than looking at their webpage and seeing their data recovery services. After reading forums today I haven't had time to mount the drives with any of my forensic packages to see the internals of the HPA. I can also see no reason to have an HPA on the drives at all. The controller should be handling all RAID functions. RAID should be hot swappable! The "I" in RAID being inexpensive is hard to swallow when paying full retail top dollar for a drive. I don't see a need to image a physical drive and then have to image the HPA block by block to get past the "swap protection".

Looking a little deeper and I came across an attorney webpage looking for owners of these drives for their participation in a class action lawsuit. Search under Sklar Law Offices. Seems there is something brewing. I'm certified in forensics, security, and Cisco networking with 15 years combined experience in both the NYPD and technology and I may just give them a call to really pick one of these drives apart.

Garbage
I just had a run-in with Maxtor. After purchasing their drive, it failed within 6 months. I was then told that I would be charged a MINIMUM of $700. Data recovery, you see, is apparently not covered by the warranty. If you attempt to recover it anywhere else, since they have to open the drive to do it, you're no longer under the warranty.

I was then told by them that I should never rely upon one backup unit. THE POINT WAS THAT IT WAS THE BACKUP UNIT! For such an expensive item, I think I deserve more service.

total failure
We bought one of these for our department at a hospital. It failed. The replacement failed, and the replacement for the replacement failed. Rather than send it back and get a FOURTH one, we've voided out warranty and ripped it apart, and are putting the drives inside (which are still readable) in a different enclosure.

Something that should be a huge warning sign to anyone thinking of buying one of these (and which we will watch out for in the future) is that the drives are not user-swappable. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF A MIRRORED RAID ARRAY! When one of the drives goes bad, the user can swap it out with another one him/herself!