Maxtor USB Drive

My new Buffalo LinkStation arrived the other day from TigerDirect. As advertised, setup took just a couple of minutes and I had 120GB of extra storage available on my home network. But, as PC Magazine noted, access to the drive is rather slow.

This is compounded by the fact that my network is wireless (802.11b). I started transferring a backup folder with about 5.5GB of data and two hours later it was just over halfway done. I would not recommend this drive to anyone with a wireless network. So, I decided to give up the network connectivity, and instead bought an external USB drive.

Maxtor's 200GB OneTouch USB/Firewire drive is a great piece of gear. It is extremely fast in transferring too -- my 5.5GB of data copied in 5 or 10 minutes. The OneTouch functionality seems like it would be a good idea too, although I haven't yet installed the backup software to take advantage of the cool blue button on the front of the drive.