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Maxtor Basics External Desktop Hard Drive review

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Verdict

Predictably unsophisticated, but huge in capacity and very affordable

Review Date: 24 Aug 2009

Reviewed By: Darien Graham-Smith

Price when reviewed: £85 (£98 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
5 stars out of 6

Value for Money
6 stars out of 6

Performance
4 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

They call it Basics, and they’re not kidding: this is a drive that makes even some portables look extravagant. It sports an access-light at the front, mini-USB and power sockets at the back, and, technology-wise, that’s it. The only other connector is a slot for a Kensington lock, to prevent miscreants from picking the thing up and carrying it away.

Where the Basics excels is capacity. It offers a massive 1.5TB of storage, although when freshly formatted in NTFS it has a capacity of 1,396GB. The discrepancy is thanks to the way Maxtor – and all hard disk manufacturers – count gigabytes, which inflates the apparent sizes of their drives.

But although the Maxtor Basics external drive may be less capacious than you’d think, it still works out at a tiny price of 6p per gigabyte – better value than even some internal drives. And although such assurances invariably come back to haunt us, at present we don’t see too many ways you’re likely to fill even 1,396GB in the foreseeable future.

Indeed, this being a USB-only drive, to do so would entail more than 13 hours of continuous writing. That’s based on test results showing that the Basics took a very creditable 1min 45secs to receive our 3GB file. Other results weren’t so impressive, though: reading the file back took 1min 39secs, several seconds slower than some rival drives. Performance in our 3,000-file test was merely average.

In an apparent bid to add some interest to this world’s simplest drive, Maxtor has put it in a slightly quirky housing. It bulges, as if physically crammed with data, and discreet slots run down one side. The opposite side is smooth and shiny, to contrast with the mottled texture that covers the rest of the casing. It’s all rather arbitrary, but pleasing enough.

With no freebie software and no accessories, this is hardly a luxury offering – but then the name never suggested it would be. Rather, the Maxtor Basics focuses on price and capacity; and on those terms it’s the best deal you’ll find.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith

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Comments

User comments

The drive does look jolly good, however I'll bet it will be sold as a 1.5tb disk when it isn't. Surely this must be illegal, or at the least false advertising? Is there a way for drives to be increased in size internally to actually have the amount of space advertised after formatting? Otherwise we're justgoing to continue down this utterly false route.

By bubbles16 on 25 Aug 2009

I've got the 500GB version and it's close to perfect. Why? You plug it in and it just works; no software to install, no drivers, nothing. My (Vista) PC just sees it as a drive, instantly. It's also reasonably quiet, and the design, though simple, is also pleasing on the eye. Why pay more?

By Bureaunet on 25 Aug 2009

Yeah, I have a 1TB one which I use to store my backups of all my media editing. Perfect for storing my 300MB photoshop files, and 5GB raw video... at only just twice the price of burning a dvd-r, it certainly is amazing1

By all4nothing on 25 Aug 2009

bubbles16: I share your frustration, but strictly speaking the hard disk manufacturers are in the right. Multiple standards organisations have affirmed that the prefix "tera" denotes a multiple of 10^12, and not 2^40 - despite that being the more common usage in the computing industry.

It is annoying, though, and it's a problem that only gets worse as we come to deal with ever larger units of data. Every time you go up a prefix the discrepancy grows by 2.3%; so while a decimal megabyte is only 4.6% smaller than a binary one, the gap between a decimal petabyte and a binary one is a whole 11.2%.

By DarienGS on 26 Aug 2009

Don't buy one, I have got two that have failed after a few days. All they do is just make a hunting sound and a friend has had one that failed also after a few days use, he has had his replaced.

I have not had mine replaced yet as I have too much info on them and I am not sure if I have lost anything that I need.

Maxtor (Seagate) are not interested in replacing the control boards that I know is the problem, all thay can do is replace the complete unit.

DON'T BUY ONE

By harveylex on 27 Aug 2009

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