Conclusion

The external Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition hard drive with 1TB storage capacity will undoubtedly find its niche in the market. There are hardly any external solutions out there that can offer that much storage space today. The portability of this drive and the support of three interfaces make it very suitable for archiving and transportation of large data chunks when the configuration of the system is unknown. High speed of this solution is also an advantage. FireWire 800 interface and RAID 0 support allow transferring up to 1TB of data within an acceptable period of time. Although we have just shown in our test session that FireWire 800 interface wasn’t faster than FireWire 400 in some cases, however, it may also result from the different operating systems we used. The widely spread USB 2.0 interface with higher theoretical bandwidth than FireWire 400 once again turned out less efficient, however it will still be needed if there is no FireWire connector in the system.

Since Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition family offers devices that support RAID 0 or RAID 1, you can always choose what is best for your needs. Of course, the price of solutions like that is quite high and hence not so many users will go for an external piece of storage that expensive. So taking into account the specifics of this product I would assume that it is going to become more popular in the corporate market rather than in the home solutions market.