Josey Puliyenthuruthel: Storage to the max

GIZMO GALLERY

If you are part of a large corporation or a government department and the use of computers is an integral part of your work day, it is likely that your office already has some system "" rudimentary, perhaps "" of backing up your data and applications.

But, if you work in a small scale company or run services from a small office-home office set up, you are likely to be using an old PC or one of the office servers to back up critical data.

This is not the best of solutions and could prove an expensive disaster, if one of the rickety hard disks should fail. I've had a nasty experience once in my old office and still rue the chalta hain attitude to which my colleagues and I had succumbed.

I've heard similar horror stories from businessmen who travel a lot and have lost data because they dropped their notebook computers and the hard disk died on them.

It is with this background that I've been reading with interest various external hard disk drives "" some ultraportable for use on the road "" in the market. One such product that was launched in India is the Maxtor OneTouch series.

Built on the success of a legacy product (Personal Storage 5000 with the OneTouch feature) from the company, the Maxtor OneTouch series of external hard disk drives have been received well internationally, even though they are priced a little more than competing products.

Maxtor OneTouch drives come in six models ranging from 80 gigabytes to 300 GB storage. Sold through NYSE-listed Maxtor Corp's Indian distributors Cyberstar, Ingram Micro and eSys, the prices of the various models are: 80 GB/7200RPM (with a USB 2.0 port) sells for Rs 8,000, 120GB/7200RPM (USB 2.0) for Rs 9,000, 200GB/ 7200RPM (USB 2.0/FireWire combo) for Rs 14,000, 250GB/ 7200RPM (USB 2.0/FireWire combo) for Rs 16,300, 250GB/ 7200RPM Mac-formatted version for Rs 16,300 and the 300GB/5400RPM (USB 2.0/ FireWire combo) for Rs 18,500. Sales tax or octroi charges are extra and vary depending on which part of India you buy it in.

The Maxtor OneTouch drive (I reviewed the 250GB model) is wrapped in an attractive aluminum exterior that is light yet gives the feeling of being rugged. It can be mounted upright on a vertical stand that aims at saving space on a cluttered table. It comes with a USB and a FireWire port.

The FireWire port is especially useful when you are backing up large quantities of data (like graphics) from a desktop or notebook computer, or transferring video images from a camcorder.

For instance, copying some 15GB of music files from my notebook to the Maxtor OneTouch drive took more than 20 minutes using the USB port. Further, FireWire ports allow you to connect several computers together to the external drive.

Setting up the drive is easy. With a Microsoft Windows XP system, you just plug in the power cord, turn on the drive, and connect a USB or FireWire cable.

The OS will recognise the drive, which you can then use like any other, except for booting. A wizard guides you through configuration of the automatic backup settings, making the process painless.

You can also create additional backup scripts to run manually, or set timed back ups. It may take long "" my machine took almost two hours "" to back up your system the first time, but future backups were much faster.

Backing up files is done just by pressing a button, a neat feature. (Comparable products like Western Digital and Seagate drives also, I'm told, have this feature, but I haven't reviewed them.) The button throws up Dantz's Retrospect utility that backs up only new and changed files.

Disaster recovery couldn't get easier. One other useful feature of the Maxtor OneTouch is that it is "hot-swappable", which means you can use the same drive to back up several computers if they are not all on a network.

The utility of an external drive is not just a back-up resource for your computer. It also serves as additional space for data or files that you don't have frequent use for.

You can, for instance, store approximately 53 feature-length DVD quality films or 62,500 4-minute MP3 tunes or upto 250,000 high resolution digital photo on the 250 GB Maxtor OneTouch hard drive!

(Josey Puliyenthuruthel can be reached at mailto:josey@vsnl.net)