Josey Puliyenthuruthel: The big daddies of external storage

GIZMO GALLERY

Last July, these columns reviewed an external hard disk made by Maxtor Corp vying with the powerful brands Iomega and Seagate as also smaller rivals LaCie and Direct Data.

The trend of external hard drives was just about beginning then. It has since caught on with more and more businesses and homes acquiring these portable stores for their data, music and movies. Maxtor, Iomega and Seagate are benefiting from this trend.

In the last one month, I received a couple of emails from readers asking me for advice on external hard disk options.

This, I decided, was a good time for a shootout between two external hard disks: Maxtor's 300 GB One Touch II and an Iomega HDD 250 GB box that I've been using for the last few months.

Such memory will have administrators of computer networks in small offices and the heavy computer user (the likes who think 512 kbps broadband connections are not fast enough) salivating.

I don't belong to either category and am quite overwhelmed with the endless shelves on my Iomega hard disk on which I and the rest of my family can shove pictures, movies and data when the disks on our computers get full. Yet we're nowhere near using even a fifth of the external hard disk.

The Maxtor OneTouch II is a sequel to, well, the OneTouch series and offers more of everything: larger storage, better performance and tight security. A 300 GB capacity translates into about 5,000 hours of your favourite music (I am just touching 15 GB and have several hours of songs and compositions).

In visual terms, it can take about 21 hours of video or a quarter million pictures! The OneTouch II has both two ports depending on the amount of data you want to transfer: the USB port is good enough for normal use, while the FireWire port makes transfer of even movies a breeze.

Setting up the Maxtor OneTouch II is very easy with the installation CD leading the way. I consider the Palm handheld computers among the best personal technology inventions in the last 20 years for one reason: the ease of data synching. You just need to press a button on the Palm's hot-sync cradle and presto the data gets backed up.

The OneTouch II has a similar feature: press a blue button and it automatically backs up all the files on your computer. Maxtor engineers have continued with their Dantz Retrospect Express HD software for this feature. What I liked best about this Maxtor product is the near-silent operation. It doesn't get very warm either; that could be traced to its aluminium case and well-designed vents.

In comparison, the Iomega HDD 250 GB that sits on my desk, while not being excessively loud, makes enough noise to distract you when the phones and digital radio is silent. The lack of a FireWire port "" though I'm told other Iomega models have it "" and a missing back-up hardware button are my other cribs.

That said, the Iomega performs rather well the functions expected of a back up hard disk. It comes with Iomega Automatic Backup software for full system backups and Symantec's Norton Ghost software for disaster recovery.

Norton Ghost 2003 allows users to restore or replace an entire hard drive without reinstalling the operating system and application software.

At the end of testing, I found the Maxtor OneTouch II and the Iomega HDD 250 GB pretty substitutable especially if you can get an Iomega model that has a FireWire port for those bulky video transfers.

The Maxtor OneTouch II is priced in India at Rs 13,750 plus taxes which is about $ 315, not very much more than the $ 300-tag it sports in American stores.

An Iomega 250 GB external disk with a FireWire port retails for about $ 250 in the US and will be more when it is made easily available in India. But if you or a friend are travelling to the US in time for seasonal sales, these prices could go down by up to half!

(Comments can be sent to Josey Puliyenthuruthel at josey@vsnl.net )