Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini (80 GB)
Once again here, we're looking at a portable version of an external hard drive. The regular Maxtor drive is called the OneTouch 4 Plus, so this ultra-portable storage device is the OneTouch 4 Mini. They look alike, and they both offer the same software-based feature set.
Although I said that the Maxtor drive has an appearance that resembles a steel brick (or an ash tray if you remember our initial 3.5" external hard drive roundup), the look and feel is indeed very nice. Build quality is even better than with most of its competitors. The activity LED also works as a backup button, which you can use to trigger a backup or synchronization process.
Maxtor only offers 80, 120 and 160 GB capacities, which doesn't really look like much. We first thought that Seagate, which owns Maxtor, did not want the OneTouch 4 Mini to become a competitor for the FreeAgent Go drives - but these are not yet available at higher capacity points either. To make up for the average capacities, all Maxtor and Seagate retail drives come with a nice five-year factory warranty.
