Maxtor Debuts Fast, Huge, Portable HD

Maxtor offers 80GB and 40GB affordable, external FireWire drives.

Tom Spring, PCWorld.com

Hard drives are swelling in capacity just as quickly as they're shrinking in price. So the challenge today is in finding reliable storage that fits a fast and portable PC lifestyle.

Throwing down the gauntlet is Maxtor with its new Maxtor 1394 External Storage drives. The drives are available in two sizes: 80GB ($400) and 40GB ($280). The drive attaches to a PC via an IEEE 1394 (also branded as FireWire by Apple and i.Link by Sony) high-speed connection, which offers data transport speed ratings that are over 33 times faster than the current Universal Serial Bus 1.1. While IEEE 1394's transfer rating doesn't match the peak rating of the latest internal IDE hard drives, which is 100MB (or 800 megabits) per second, in everyday use as a secondary hard drive it performs very well.

Maxtor is betting that fast access to massive amounts of storage will perk the interest of digital video, music, and photo buffs hungry to keep applications or data on a portable drive. Luckily, 80GB is a lot of space: You can squeeze in, for example, about 20,000 4-minute, 128-bit-rate MP3s on this single drive.

Fast and Portable

We ran the 80GB model through its paces, and were generally impressed by its performance and ease of use. The 5400-rpm Maxtor drive is small in external dimensions (1.6 by 6 by 8.6 inches) and comes with a 6-foot FireWire cable. The drive also comes with a power source and has an extra IEEE port for daisy chaining other FireWire devices.

The IEEE 1394 interface makes attaching the hard disk to your PC or Mac a snap. Just as you can with USB devices, you can attach and detach IEEE 1394 peripherals to and from your system without rebooting. That flexibility makes the drive an excellent choice if you want to share resources among multiple PCs.

The catch: Few PCs include an IEEE 1394 port at this time. That means most users will have to crack open their PC cases to install a 1394 PCI adapter card. Recognizing that, Maxtor is offsetting the costs of a 1394 adapter; the company is offering a $50 rebate with the purchase of a $50 Maxtor 1394 PCI Adapter Card, or a $99 1394 PC Card adapter for notebook computers.

While many novice users might blanch at the idea of having to get inside their PCs, installing a PCI card is usually not all that hard, and we encountered no problems installing Maxtor's 1394 controller card. After powering down our PC, all we had to do was insert the card into an open PCI slot and tighten its fastener. We then attached the unit and installed a driver from our Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition CD-ROM. Maxtor says the minimum system requirements for this drive are a Pentium II PC running Windows 98 SE, Me, or 2000; the drive is also compatible with Macs--no drivers are needed.

Data Transfer Fast Lane

We informally tested the Maxtor's transfer rates by copying both a folder containing 100MB of files and a single 100MB image file to and from our 700-MHz Pentium III system with 128MB of SDRAM. The Maxtor drive impressed us when it dealt with the single image file, averaging about 9MB per second transferring the image file and 8MB/second transferring it back--fast enough to satisfy the high-bandwidth needs of video editors. However, we were disappointed that the 100MB folder took considerably longer, averaging about 1.7MB/second.

Maxtor says that you can't yet boot Windows from its drive, but that feature should be available next year with the release of Microsoft's successor to Windows 2000, called Whistler. For now, all you can do is store data and install applications onto the drive--which we did without any problems.

Maxtor's use of the slower 5400-rpm disks has allowed it to keep costs down, making this drive one of the most affordable out there. There are faster external 7200-rpm drives on the market, but few that compete at Maxtor's $400 price point. The price alone makes the Maxtor 1394 External Storage a good deal if you need additional space right now, and if you don't mind installing an IEEE 1394 card (assuming your PC lacks the port).