Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 500GB Review

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bonnie keyser • January 11, 2008
Rating: 0.5/5
Product was difficult to set up on MAC and it froze within 20 minutes of the first attempt to clone the drive. After that, the drive never showed its full capacity. Tech support (after 2 phone calls) recommended that I return the product. I will buy another brand.
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Richard Linkter • January 14, 2008
Rating: 3/5
The Maxtor OneTouch 4 was a mixed bag. Read/write is ok over USB2.0 but not blazing fast or slow. The enclosure feels cheapish, and Seagate (who own Maxtor’s) support is patchy – some staff are great, other FOB you off.
Redeeming features:
Long warranty, cheap price.
Rating: 6 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Doc • February 5, 2008
Rating: 1/5
I have two older external USB drives and this new one seems to like to butt in line ALL the time. [And yes, I did try changing the cord connections to the USB ports to no avail - no configurations made the problem go away] Cannot use it to backup either of my older USB drives that I store pictures and video on, which is the purpose for which I purchased it to begin with. Technical support was decidedly unhelpful as to how to resolve this issue. Tried Acronis backup software to do this, without any more luck than using the software supplied. Drive just HANGS. Having some luck using DriveImageXL to backup my system drive; wondering if I am pressing my luck to try to do this with my video files.
All in all, I wish I had not purchased this particular drive; but it’s too late. Best buy has that 15% restocking fee, and it’s a pain to hassle with.
Beware, this drive wants to be a noisy only child.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Mike • March 3, 2008
Rating: 0.5/5
Saved disk looked great until need it. Says all files restored, the only problem is XP and Norton can’t find file system. You can’t go get only the files you need. It is all or nothing. In this case nothing!
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Tom • March 24, 2008
Rating: 1/5
Tech support is virtually non-existent. My drive is no longer recognized by my computer after a grueling 40 days of usage. The disc it comes with is the biggest joke I’ve seen in awhile. Western Digital here I come.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Delinka • April 4, 2008
Rating: 4.5/5
Bought this drive a week ago, it’s just great. Though I never used the software that came with it I’m very impressed with the hardware. It looks good (except for the one touch button which looks odd), is not noisy nor gets very hot and is extremely fast. I was able to back up close to 200GB of data I have gathered over the years very quickly and now I feel much safer!
Rating: 9 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Bob • April 14, 2008
Rating: 0.5/5
Will only restore 1 song at a time…I have thousands..IF it works…which mine brand new tells me runtime asks it to close in an unusual manner..NO restoring..! virtually NO tech support… Returning it tomorrow..owned it 48 hrs…
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
John • April 14, 2008
Rating: 5/5
Really simple to install. Scheduled backups working fine. Yes, it can automatically backup your Outlook emails if you know how to set it up. It is a very nice product that can be found at reasonable price.
Rating: 10 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Michael Gallagher • May 20, 2008
Rating: 2/5
Appears to work OK, but unable to get SafetyDrill feature to work. Two phone calls to tech support unhelpful. Will try again on Monday (no weekend support). Read one review which indicated SafetyDrill feature will not work with 64 bit systems (mine is). Hope this isn’t true. If it is, would be nice if they made it clear on the packaging.
Rating: 4 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Ken Kirsch • May 25, 2008
Rating: 2/5
I too am disappointed, and agree that Seagate should either make software compatible with Vista 64bit systems or make a statement that it is not. I am now in search of 3rd party software that will make my paper-weight a back-up.
Rating: 4 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
NJS • May 26, 2008
Rating: 1/5
Overall, I have been rather disapointed with this product. It does/did back-up, but I am constantly getting an error, with a requset/demand to use check disk to see what is wrong. I do this and it works for a short time them goes bad again. Just NOT DEPENDABLE. I want something I can depend on to work, not something that I have to coddle. I would not buy this agin.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Ubaque Lozano Buenaventura • July 31, 2008
Rating: 1/5
Recently I bough an external hardrive -MAXTOR ONE TOUCH 4-. I was really disappointed. After 3 months the drive failed and when I asked for recovering my information on it I was informed that I that I have to pay $500. Be careful with this thing.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
kirby • August 11, 2008
Rating: 1/5
I purchased this drive because I had problems with a western digital drive. After moving files to the external drive, they would just disappear or become corrupted. Guess what…the maxtor does the exact same thing. Now I get to go through data recovery…AGAIN.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
R Sackerson • August 19, 2008
Rating: 2/5
Best drive out there? Long way to go. Can’t do entire system backup of my Vista LT. All I want to do is plug in the drive once in awhile and backup to where I can do a system recovery if the HDD fails. Want to be able to backup multiple PCs. Don’t think I should need to buy a 2nd one for my MAC. I don’t want to set up a schedule, just want to plug it in and backup a PC when I feel like it. I am sorry to learn that this is the best backup drive available.
Rating: 4 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Skibby • September 5, 2008
Rating: 1/5
I bought the External Maxtor one touch 4 500gb yadda yadda yadda.
Yeah, the thing broke down on me like 4 days after buying it. Everything put into it erased and the drive won’t even kick in. I then asked to get the data recovered they said they would do it for $700. Forget that. I would not recommend to buy it anytime soon.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Jon S. • September 16, 2008
Rating: 1/5
From the get-go, this hardware was nothing but trouble. It’s slow to spin up and sometimes would fail to recognize the drive at all. I lived with it, since I used it as a “halfway house” for my video files and photographs. Often times, I simply cycled the power and it was good to go.
Well, after four months, the drive managed to wipe out its FAT table for some reason. It still sees the drive, but Windows doesn’t recognize it as formatted media. Judging by the other reviews, I am not whistling on the tundra about this drive. There are better drives out there for the money. This Seagate/Maxtor drive is a dog.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Joe • November 28, 2008
Rating: 1/5
I bought the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus in May 2008 based on Maxtor’s reputation and the backup capabilities. It’s a sharp looking drive. It worked great up until a week ago. I was running a program on my laptop that accessed the drive and left the house for a bit. When I got back I had to reboot and when everything came back up it said there was a password on the Maxtor and needed unlocked. I never put a password on it. Tried every password I know–even used password cracker programs. I ran all kinds of tests and recovery programs to see if I could access the drive, changed drivers, reinstalled the software, hooked it up to other PC’s–nothing worked. I even got the software message stating that the drive needed formatted, so I tried that and it couldn’t do it. The thing is a paperweight now with a ton of information on it. I went and bought a WD WorldBook to replace it. SeaGate told me they never heard of the drive doing anything like that before and yet there’s tons of stuff in their forums and on the net now about it. The offered to replace it, but I can’t turn the drive in since it has some confidential information on it. I guess their reputation isn’t as good as it used to be. Won’t buy another one of their products.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
wayne • December 31, 2008
Rating: 1/5
I bought this 500GB one touch from staple as the black friday deal in 2007, and the nightmare started shortly. It reported unidentified drive now and then, which usually took a power cycle or a restart, well that wasn’t too bad. Then my xp started chkdsk on starting, deleting orphaned files, recovering and blah blah. After that, a lot of video files disappeared mysteriously. It has happened a few times, oh stupid me, I hate myself making the worst purchase in my life. Next I’ll delete the damm onetouch software and let it act as a plain ext hard drive, and hopefully the piece of junk can be recycled. My prayer with finger crossed
PS. it seems the lowest rating is 1 out of 5 stars. It is absolutely unfair for this drive, which is worth no more than 0. Unfortunately negative stars are unvailable.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Greg • December 31, 2008
Rating: 1/5
Followed all instructions to install. Every time I tried to use the drive, something else wrong would happen – not identifiable after a couple minutes of being identified, backup errors showed up with no resolution available, on-line help to complicated and not helpful. This was on an HP computer, if that is the constraint I don’t know. Will return the drive.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Gary Wild • January 1, 2009
Rating: 1/5
This product will fail and you will go thru hell trying to get support. Don’t make the same mistake that I and thousands of others have.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Robin Schmittel • February 16, 2009
Rating: 3/5
I Purchased one of these as a backup for my computer about 2 weeks ago. It installed and set up easily; the software is ok. This last Thursday morning I had a message pop up that said the drive was not partitioned. (The backup utility is set to run every night at 1am.) Needless to say the drive was unreadable by my computer. I was unable to recover any of the data off of the drive. I ended up doing a low level format followed by partitioning and re-formatting the drive.
Everything is working fine again but I’m not too sure that I trust the drive anymore. The capacity of the drive is now 465GB with the remaining of the 500GB being (I assume) damaged sectors.
I did not attempt to contact Seagate with this problem though I still may. The drive has a 5 year warrantee but what I did to get it to work again may have voided it. Was only $95.00 so no big loss.
I’m doing a 48 hour read/write burn in on the drive right now.
Rating: 6 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Scott A. Chase • November 16, 2009
Rating: 0.5/5
Decent drive when it works. I had my first one die on me, got it replaced, and now that one has died. I am not even sure whether it is worth getting the second one replace.
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Paul M. • December 2, 2009
Rating: 0/5
These people just don’t care about customers.
Rating: 0 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Tim Searles • February 2, 2010
Rating: 0.5/5
I’ve used the Maxtor OneTouch 4 plus for about 3 years

One day Windows XP refuses to recognize the disk. Acromis can open it see the data but Support want 700 + to retrieve it.
If you buy one for $200 be prepared to spend big bucks to get you data back.
Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.