I just recently purchased a Maxtor OneTouch II Firewire 800 drive to use for portable storage and backups of my various computers. Since I have a PowerBook with a FireWire 800 interface, I figured I’d take advantage of that and grab a FW800 drive. Fortunately for the rest of my machines this unit also includes a FireWire 400 port, and one USB 2.0 port. The theory was I would be able to use this drive across one Macintosh, two Windows, and one Linux machine. Great idea in theory, reality was somewhat more complicated.
The drive comes initialized as a Macintosh HFS+ drive. Not a big deal since my intent was to use it on the PowerBook, however, Windows is unable to understand HFS+ partitions. Problem #1. I figured I’d just reformat the thing to NTFS and the Mac would pick it right up. Easy right? Not a chance. It appears because of NTFS’s proprietary nature, OS X has read only support for the NTFS file system.
My next thought was to use FAT32. This aged file system has a number of issues that made it unsuitable for use on this drive. Not the least of which was its restriction on file sizes being under four gigabytes. Since I had intended to use it for backups and storage, it is conceivable that I might create a disk image of greater than four gigabytes. FAT32 was out.
Now what? It seemed as if I had a drive that I couldn’t use across all platforms, which seemed utterly ludicrous. I bemoaned my fate to one of my colleagues who immediately said, “Get MacDrive.” I’ll be damned if that wasn’t exactly what I needed. The software installed into Windows and allows you to mount HFS+ devices seamlessly. This allowed me to use the HFS+ file system with journaling enabled and still use it on the Windows machines. Joy!
Beyond this little issue, the rest of this kit is fairly nice, hardware wise. More on that in a moment. The hard drive is silent and speedy. It does what it is supposed to do, act as an external hard drive. It comes enclosed in a nice silvery case, and includes all the cables and power adapters you might need. Maxtor didn’t skimp on the hardware side of things.
The software that comes with the drive is something else entirely. The Maxtor OneTouch II comes packaged with a crippled version of Dantz Retrospect. I’ve never cared for Retrospect in the first place, but I figured what the heck it came with the drive. What rubbish. It refused to launch on my Windows XP machine. I skimmed the manual and it was really a rather limited piece of software. The good news: you don’t need this “software” to use the drive under either Windows or Mac OS X. Grab a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner, or FileSync and you will be good to go.
OK so my cross platform woes where largely eliminated, although I have yet to get my Linux box up and running I don’t anticipate any problems mounting HFS+ with Linux. Famous last words I know. Bottom line, good hardware, bad software which you don’t really need.