Maxtor OneTouch 200GB w/ FW400 & USB 2.0 $60

[coius]

Picked up a Maxtor OneTouch 200GB HDD off of craigslist NIB for $60USD. I got it hooked up to my TiBook Desktop and have it as the boot device. I tell ya, that extra speed of the HDD makes a *HUGE* difference. The machine boots up 2-3x as fast, and applications pop up almost instantly.

I kept trying to figure out why it was so slow, and when I hooked this up, I found out why.

a 60GB 4200RPM IDE laptop drive with 4MB cache is HORRIBLE for speed. I was doing a transfer of 14GB from the internal laptop drive to the external FW 200GB OneTouch drive and it took over an hour.

Glad I picked it up, but I will be putting a different drive into it. I don't want the drive to keel over judging on what other people on the net are saying about it. Then again.. I am not going to use this as a backup, but just as a drive to dick around with.

I am glad I got it, mainly because it has firewire, but MAN is it fast...

Not sure what else I want to do with it. The internal drive on my MacBook is faster than that external, but I *could* put my Hitachi 1TB HDDs into it when I upgrade to dual 1.5TB later in the year. I might also just put the 1TB Drives into my main pc and get another TB drive for this.

 

[Christopher]

Try dealing with a 4200RPM drive with 2MB cache.

 

[coius]

Heh. Yeah, i know how bad it can get with slow drives.

I had a client that had a machine that instead of the 40GB HDD it had when it died, he took a 5400RPM HDD with 2MB Cache and was 10GB from an older tower (ATA-16MB/s) and put it in the tower. Mind you, it was running XP Home on it, and he was too cheap to buy a new HDD. Which a new 100GB would have cost him a total of $30.

That thing, with a NEW install, took about 1.5hours to install, and took like 5 minutes to boot. Just because of the slow HDD.

I think he actually was blown away when I got him to upgrade to a 160GB HDD. The thing, from a cold install, took like 45 seconds to boot, and another 30 seconds to be usable.

You should see how quickly my server 2003 Pentium IV w/ HyperThreading is to boot.

I have a PCI SATA-150 card and dual Terabyte drives in RAID-1, and the thing takes less than 30 seconds to boot and log in with some of the mods I have done (Turn off the Boot Screen, do some registry mods) and it's good to serve.

A lot of the time, the Server Sharing turns like like halfway through the boot sequence (before the auto-login) and it's ready to access.

It is so awesome when you have a fast HDD. It totally rocks

 

[iamdigitalman]

Nice. I got a Seagate Freeagent Desktop a year ago, 250gb for $80. It was a refurb. Sucks the sleep timer can only be adjusted in the windows software, but I borrowed a friend's machine to do it on. It worked perfectly, until leopard.

When I tried setting it up with time machine, it would get to a certain point copying files, and fail. I figured it out, by partitioning with 2 partitions, and then back to 1, and it works perfectly now with TM.

I was thinking for a bit there to get a external case with FW400 on it to stick the drive in, as I cracked the thing open and it's just a seagate desktop SATA drive, but those buggers (cases) are so damn expensive, at least the ones with FW400 on board.

Oddly enough, both the internal drive's SN and the part number on the bottom of the case report the thing as out of warranty, even though I only got it a year ago, and there is a sticker on the bottom saying "Seagate certified refurbished". I thought that meant it carries the same 5 year warranty as the rest of their hard drives do. I know my 80gb seagate notebook drive, which is now sitting in an external case I bought, I bought used, and it is still in warranty. I also got it at the same place I got the external.

 

[slimac55]

Congratulations. I've got a 120GB OneTouch (got it for approximately AU$100) that I use for backup and I think it works very nicely.

 

[Christopher]

Sweet deal, I actually have the low end Maxtor 3200 series, had it since 2006 and it hasn't failed me yet.