Labs

The OneTouch 4 Plus from Maxtor is one of the more unusual desktop hard disks looked at this month. The exterior eschews the more versatile rectangular shape of the LaCie drive, and instead goes for an odd angular shape with brushed aluminium sides.

It's one of the lighter desktop drives on test, weighing slightly over a kilogram, and also one of the smallest - so, even with the slightly unusual shape, it's still able to fit into relatively small nooks and crannies, which can't be said of some of the larger drives. The Freecom,

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for instance, weighs a hefty 3.2kg.

The OneTouch's practical features are slightly unusual, too. There's no super-fast eSATA interface but, alongside USB, there's a pair of FireWire sockets. It's not a particularly convincing inclusion, as our tests show FireWire is far more erratic than USB.

In our USB tests, performance was more consistently impressive across the board. It wasn't the quickest outright performer in any of the benchmarks - only joint fastest when it came to reading and writing our single 50MB file - but the Maxtor was consistently close to the top of the USB charts.

The Maxtor also offers superb value for money: at 8.8p per gigabyte, it's second only to the LaCie desktop hard disk in terms of pence-per-gigabyte thanks to this model's huge 1TB capacity.

True, the performance of eSATA drives like the Western Digital is beyond the Maxtor, but the simple truth is that not many people currently have eSATA capabilities on their old laptops and PCs. The Maxtor is light, small and comes complete with a huge capacity for a respectable price - and, as such, is a worthy desktop winner.