| Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 80GB External Hard Drive
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Performance:
To test the performance of the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini, it was connected to two USB 2.0 ports on a system running Windows XP Professional with all current updates. The basic hardware components of this system included the following:
» ASUS K8N-DL NVIDIA nForce4 Professional motherboard
» 2x Opteron 270 processors with Thermalright Ultra-90 coolers
» 6x 512MB HP Branded PC3200 DDR REG memory
» 1x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB SATA 3 Gbps hard drive
» 1x Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB SATA 3 Gbps hard drive
» 256 MB HIS IceQ X1300XT Turbo PCIe graphics card
» PC Power and Cooling 750 Quad Black Power Supply
The drive was immediately detected by Windows and available for use, but only if two USB connections were used. Just to see if it really needed two free ports and the special cable in order to operate, I tried it with just one port and nothing happened.
The two screen shots below show the results provided by a pair of similar benchmarks; HD Tune 2.53 (left) and HD Tach 3.0.4.0 (right). Both benchmarks indicate an access time of 18 seconds and change, while HD Tach provides more impressive results in terms of average read speed (27.1 MB/s) and burst speed (29.2 MB/s). Checking out the HD Tach results from a few other recently reviewed 2.5" devices with USB connectivity (one, two, and three), shows the results are in the same ball park.
 
A third benchmark was also executed on the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini. The results from SiSoftware Sandra XII's Physical Disks test are shown below, and are in general agreement with the first two tests.
The drive seemed quick in testing, and even more importantly, while in real world use. While it made some clicking sounds when first connected, it becomes extremely quiet when fully up and running. I had the unit on my desk just to the left of my keyboard, and I actually had to lay my hand on it to see if it was really spinning. Speaking of placing my hand on the unit; what about heat? Using a thermal probe with digital display, I monitored the top and bottom surface temperatures while the drive was getting a workout running the benchmarks above. While maintaining an ambient temperature of 76F (24.4C), the top surface reached a maximum of 108F (42.2C), and the bottom reached a maximum of 104F (40C). Fairly cool, and definitely better than many other passively cooled hard drives in completely sealed enclosures.
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