Advantages: Fast, huge capacity, reliable, well built, quiet, good compromise between speed and price
Disadvantages: Relatively expensive, not the biggest or fastest

...as the cache is used for the most often accessed files. The bigger, the better. This 200GB Maxline Plus II has a very high density of storage -more data fits on the disk per inch of magnetic medium inside. This will hopefully help the drive to attain high levels of performance since more data can be read per spin. ***Edit.: One feature I should probably emphasise is the fact that this drive uses fluid dynamic bearings. I understand that this might be knew to some people and just another piece of jargon which they are bombarded with by marketing, but it is important. It simply means that the bearings for the spindles have a special type of seating in the drive. A fluid dynamic bearing (FDB in TLA marketing speak), is a thin layer of oil or other lubricant injected between the shaft and sleeve of a spindle. The bearing uses a rotating shaft... Read review

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Advantages: Price, Speed, Reliability
Disadvantages: Noise

...I have been using this drive for some months now having bought it to augment my then system. I have used Maxtor drives almost exclusively in the past and have found them to be both reliable and fast drives, I have not yet needed to return one, unlike with other brands. Maxtor offer a good range of drives now including SATA and PATA drives (such as this one) with 2mb and 8mb cache sizes. I opted for the lower as I had no need for the slight improvement in speed as this drive was only ever intended as a media storage drive. The pricing of these drives and indeed the entire Maxtor range is competitive. Though not the cheapest drives available I believe that the small difference increase in price over the cheap drives is worth it for the potential gains in reliability and speed. Maxtor only have Western Digital to match them... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, quiet, Plug and Play
Disadvantages: Supplied 'back-up' software could be better.

...on the desktop. At this point the drive can be reformatted using Disk Utility (Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility). Its worth mentioning that the drive can be used PC formatted under OSX (although it won't give maximum performance), but if you wish to share it with a PC, this might be useful. BACKING UP For very simple storage, copy files and folders to the Maxtor and nothing else is required. If your needs are more demanding, back-up software is supplied, or if you search the Downloads section at the Apple site, simpler alternatives are available - some Freeware. Personally, I found the supplied back-up software unnecessarily complicated and don't use it, but it's worth trying before exploring another route, if for no other reason than you've paid for it and your opinion may differ. There is also the Maxtor's One Touch method, where a button can... Read review

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Advantages: One touch backups, transfereable from computer to computer, more reliable than tapes
Disadvantages: bulky, installing on non-Windows XP computers, takes a long time to backup

...Upon hearing the familar metal-on-metal grinding noise from inside the computer's cases, meaning one thing, you're hard drive is going to die very soon. Luckly, the good people at Maxtor have given us the 'Once touch external hard disk'. The device itself is a self contained 300 GB 7200 RPM Maxtor Hard drive with a USB 2.0 ( 480 Mbs) or Firewire (400 Mbs) interface although the maxium data transfer speeds are 41 MB/s for the Firewire version and 34 MB/s for USB. Personally I think that 300 GB is a bit excessive for home computer purposes, and I would recommend the smaller 200 GB version availible. For office, work , and corperate use it is ideal. I now recommend the use of this device as a direct replacement for tape drives, when it comes to backing up servers. The 'One touch backup feature' makes backing up important data so much... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, quiet and very good.
Disadvantages: None

...of Maxtor hard drives. After about 6 months i formatted and it's now been a year and still it's going strong, this is my second Maxtor hard drive and they are both so good. they were both quiet and fast. I have had no problems with either of these and i will never use any other make apart from Maxtor. I think they are a good buy and also a very reliable media of storage. To be honest, i think having a second hard drive is the best solution because when one packs in, you will have a backup and also you can make multiple copies of important files and store them on the separate drives. Overall, i say well done to Maxtor for making such a good generation of hard drives, and i recommend it to anyone looking for a new hard drive.... Read review

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Advantages: Simple, Easy to Use, Great value for money
Disadvantages: None

...The Personal Storage line of external hard drives comes from Maxtor, who were acquired by Seagate last year. As a subsidiary of Seagate, Maxtor is currently the world's third-largest manufacturer of hard disks. What does this mean to the consumer? It means that you're getting a high-quality product supported by a top world leader in computer storage. The Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 is a perfect example of why the Maxtor product line is so popular. Storage with the Maxtor is as simple as it can get - you will be copying files and folders to this drive within minutes of getting it out of the box. The hard drive came pre-formatted in the NTFS file system (which is more secure, efficient and generally higher performing than its predecessor, FAT) which means you can get going straight away. Not all hard drives come preformatted... Read review

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Advantages: Quiet, cheap, seems reliable+long warranty, performance is good
Disadvantages: Quality not proven, not the best performance though

...platters and different methods for implementing vibration correction in the read/write heads of the drives and you should get a quieter drive with more performance and more tolerances. For more detail on fluid dynamic bearings, read my Maxtor Maxline Plus II review which has already been posted to ciao. Samsung reckons its noise reduction technology can improve this, and have joined Seagate in producing a genuinely very very quiet drive. Compared to its competitors this drive IS noticeably quieter. Yes, I can quiet down a louder drive with washers or rubber grommetted screws, but this drive reduces the need for that and therefore becomes a possible contender in the home theatre PC market where silence is literally golden. According to Samsung, they claim the improvements are down to their bill of materials, and the shape of the drive itself... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Could hold up to 300 GB of storage
Disadvantages: The only one is standing it somewhere, not maxtors fault

...I bought this storage device as a backup for my computer files, as I work from home my computer is used by the rest of the family for personal and internet usage. So I was worried that my work which pays some of the wages towards the house could get corrupted by mutiple users of the same machine. I found that I needed to keep my work files backed up, but quickly, simply and efficiently. I have an 250 GB hard drive so in theory I can back up the whole of the drive onto my maxtors' drive it has a 300 GB capacity. The rest of the Technical information which is only on the packaging as it does not have an instruction booklet it is that simple to use is as follows:. The Maxtor has 16 MB Cache/7200 RPM It can also store 230,000 JPEG photos or 21 hrs of DV video or 5000 hrs of MP3 music obviously with the Maxtor can take combinations... Read review

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Advantages: Well Priced, Good Storage, Fast access
Disadvantages: need to use disc manager software to install alongside another hard drive

...I found that my Maxtor 20GB hard drive was running out of space, so I went hunting for a replacement. The Seagate Barracuda 80GB was the drive I finally bought, and I can honestly say that it is the best value for mo0ney piece of hardware I have ever bought. At £65 from Ebuyer.com they don't come much better. I don't know all of the technical specifications, but I do know that it seems twice as fast as the Maxtor, as well as having four times the storage capacity. When I came to install it, I decided to run it as a second drive, and leave the Maxtor connected and just use it for the operating system and drivers. If you decide to use the Seagate this way, then you will need to download the Disc Manager program off the Seagate website,(www.seagate.com). Although the site is very easy to navigate around, and the program is easy to find... Read review

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Advantages: Easy to use, cheapish to buy and does what needs to be done.
Disadvantages: A wee bit noisy.

.... Operation. I set mine to automatically backup on Friday evenings, once a week. You can set your own fequency and times to suit your needs. It does the job each week for me in about ten minutes, and I can keep using the PC while it is doing so if I wish - though it is a bit processor hungry, and lesser PCs might struggle. Then there is that blue light. It's not there just to impress visitors to your computer room, you know! Just one touch on it anytime, and an instant backup is done for you. This is how backup should be - really easy and instant. Storage It is of course possible to use all that storage space for other purposes as well as using it for backup at the same time. It's handy to keep disk hungry stuff like digital photos all albumed away on the Maxtor and keep that main drive freed up. The Maxtor will simply appear on My Computer... Read review

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