On Black Friday 2008 I purchased the Maxtor OneTouch for $60, about half of its normal retail price. Its intended use was to store downloaded books, movies and operating system iso’s that, taken together, were occupying most of my home folder. Upon unpacking the drive I was a little puzzled about the USB connection cable. It is split into two USB connections. One is labeled “power”; the other “power/data.” I thought about this and concluded that on some machines there might not be enough power in a single USB port to power the drive. Plugging the drive into two ports might correct the situation. The brochure that comes with the drive does not confirm this. In any case I have yet to use the power only connector and the drive works fine.

Also in the package was a CD with backup software. It was Windows only and of no use to myself or any Mac user for that matter. I also wondered how useful it would be to a Windows user. Wouldn’t a Windows user already have backup software installed? All I wanted was storage space and the drive would ether work or not work.

On my first attempt to use the drive I received a message informing me that “the NTFS volume had not been shut down properly and would have to be manually mounted.” NTFS???? Again, I thought about this and quickly realized that the typical FAT32 filesystem would not support a volume this large. There was another benefit too. NTFS does not have the 4GB filesize limit that has caused me some problems on other drives. A brief search on the Internet gave me the exact syntax of the mount command to make the drive usable. I have used the drive many times since then and it has always mounted automatically.

Although it did not work “out of the box”, I don’t think that needing to issue a command is beyond the ability of an average Linux user. If you find one at the same price I did, buy it. Other than the extra power connector there is really nothing special about this drive. If your in the market for a drive, I suggest shopping for the best value and perhaps giving a little weight to well known brand names. Black Friday comes only once each year, but goood sales can be found year round.