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Seagate OneTouch 4 Plus (500GB) & OneTouch 4 Mini (120GB)
Available: Now
Price: $199.99 & $119.99 MSRP
Hurting for some external storage? Whether you need a large drive at home for media storage or a portable drive for your laptop, Seagate has some new Maxtor drives for you.
PROS:
- Fast Read/Write
- PC/Mac Compatible
- Mini is Powered by USB
- Decent Back-Up Software (PC Only)
CONS:
- Software Doesn't Work on Macs
- Mini Takes Two USB Ports
Seagate acquired Maxtor, but is still releasing drives under the Maxtor brand. Here comes two new drives under the OneTouch 4 moniker: The beefy 500GB Plus and the portable 120GB Mini.
Both drives run at 7200 RPM with a 16MB cache over USB 2.0. The Plus will run over Firewire as well. While the drives themselves are fast enough to handle game access, the USB 2.0 becomes a bottleneck. This is fine for a library of older games (you haven’t reinstalled Diablo 2 recently, have you?), but for new games stick to internal drives. They work great for media, however.
We’ve been using the Mini as a backup for some of our video content. On the PC, the built-in back-up software works well and at the touch of a button. On the Mac, we’ve set it up as our Time Machine drive. Both ways work nicely in the background with no slowdown to our regular processes.
The great thing about the Mini that makes it ideal for a portable drive is that it is powered over USB. It does require two USB ports, however, so make sure you’ve got two available.
As for the Plus, we’ve been using it heavily in video editing. We were saved when one of our drives failed and we needed a new one quickly. Thankfully, we had the OneTouch 4 Plus sitting around waiting for a review. It’s about as fast as working off of an internal drive and definitely fast enough for video capture.
External drives at this point all come down to the extras. Most of them are equal in speed and size. With both of these drives, you get decent software and a great 5-year warranty. The prices we listed are MSRP, but you can probably pick them up cheaper from certain retailers.
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