Maxtor Corp., a leading maker of storage solutions, has announced its new family of external HDDs, saying it has raised the bar in consumer backup in terms of reliability, performance and security. The announcement clearly indicates an industry trend towards external HDDs, as competition in the field is heat up by WD and Maxtor.

The new Maxtor OneTouch II external drives come with a 7200rpm motor in 300GB or 250GB flavours with a 16MB buffer. Both feature a combo FireWire/USB 2.0 interface for easy connection to a Mac or PC. Besides that, Maxtor claims there are a number of capabilities that distinguish the OneTouch II from its predecessors.

• Simpler backup – no complex menus or commands or in-depth technical knowledge are required to set up the Maxtor OneTouch II drive. The new click-through installation asks a few simple questions such as the user’s name and preferred language, while configuring the software in the background to automatically back up all locally connected drives and files on the computer every day. Once installed, the Maxtor OneTouch II drive runs quietly and back ups data automatically. Users do not even have to close an application or a file for the drive to back up the saved versions.
• DriveLock security – the Maxtor OneTouch II also offers Maxtor’s new DriveLock feature for added data protection. This feature allows users to password-protect the contents of the drive, keeping important data safe from unauthorized users. Once a consumer powers down the computer, or the drive is removed from the system, access to the drive will be automatically locked until the correct user defined password is provided.
• More powerful restore – if data is lost, restoring a backed up copy from the Maxtor OneTouch II drive to the source system is simple. With historical backup copies, users can restore their entire system to its backed up status from yesterday, two days ago or even two weeks ago. The drive also self-manages its storage space and deletes older backup versions as the drive fills up.
• New user interface – Maxtor has redesigned the graphical user interface from the ground up so that installation and setup are easier than ever.
• Mac bootability function – Mac users have the option to create a fully bootable backup copy of their main system drive.

Maxtor’s OneTouch II drive offers an exclusive version of Dantz Retrospect software for easy backup, a Maxtor DriveLock security feature for added data protection and more powerful restore capabilities, including historical backup recovery.

The OneTouch II drives are available through Maxtor’s retail partners, distributors and online stores. Suggested retail price is $379.95 for 300GB and $329.95 for 250GB. Additional capacities will be rolled out later this year.