Product Reviews

The cost of external hard disks has come down a great deal in recent years, and capacities have drastically increased. With prices now lower than 20p per gigabyte they make a great choice as either a backup device or simple storage upgrade.

Design has also improved greatly, with new products competing on looks as much as their features. Thankfully, the OneTouch 4 Plus is certainly not a beige box. It has an attractive pressed and brushed metal chassis, with an unusual shaped that looks almost like a prop out of Buck Rogers.

A white glowing light on the front indicates that the power is on, while all the cable connections are nicely hidden at the rear.

The drive is a well-thought-out product: the supplied USB and power cables are both more than 1.5m long, unlike the infuriatingly short ones supplied with some external drives, and a Kensington lock connection helps to protect both the drive and any valuable data that may reside on it.

It feels solid, too, and has a compact 63 x 151mm footprint that will fit on even the smallest of desks. This

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construction does make it rather heavy, however, and it isn't something you'd want to be carrying around with your laptop at a potentially shoulder-straining 1.4kg.

With large capacities, such as the Maxtor's cavernous 750GB, the price per gigabyte becomes very competitive. The drive offers 1GB of storage space for every 16p of its retail price, an impressively low cost and on a par with one of the recommended drives from our recent external hard disk Labs: the Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition manages to offer 1TB of storage for the same cost per gigabyte.

Unfortunately for Maxtor, the MyBook beats the OneTouch on features. While FireWire and USB 2 connections are present on both drives, only the Western Digital offers an eSATA port. The benefits of such a connection can be clearly seen in the benchmark results.

During USB tests, both drives ran at comparable speeds: writing a 50MB file to the Maxtor took five seconds, and 4.5 to the Western Digital, while 50MB of small files took 11 seconds on both drives. However, the Western Digital drive surpassed these transfer rates when connected over eSATA, shifting a 50MB file in just seven seconds, and 50MB of small files in 1.5 seconds.

Now that drives have reached such enormous capacities, eSATA connections are vital to avoid agonisingly long file transfers.

For a slightly higher price of £162, the rival Western Digital offers a pleasingly round 1TB of storage, and an eSATA connection with which to fill it. Thus, even though the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus is a good all-round product, its reliance on USB keeps it from greatness.