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Maxtor 3000XT External Firewire drive

Don Bradbury looks at a 160GB drive for serious removable storage.

We recently reviewed the 40GB external Maxtor 3000LE disk drive, though that ran off USB 2.0 connectivity. This 160GB Maxtor 3000XT is a Firewire-only drive, and we have seen already how that mode of data transportation will generally be faster, for the time being, than the theoretically superior USB 2.0.

That’s because drivers and chipsets haven’t been optimized for USB 2.0 as yet. You might think, with some justification, that manufacturers shouldn’t be releasing gear with obviously inferior software, incapable of producing the goods for which punters have paid, ie faster data throughput. We would have some sympathy with that view. Patience, that’s the word! Just be thankful for small mercies, ie far superior performance than previously.

But with Firewire, aka IE1384 or iLink, there is no such problem. The technology has been around long enough - admittedly mainly on Macs, not PCs until recently - for controller and driver optimization to be near perfect. You might find you need to add a Firewire card to your system, but you may feel the need to do that in any event as a deal of other gear now requires it.

Power supply

Firewire, capable of supplying 1.5A of current, usually needs no separate power supply to run disk drives, taking all it needs from the port itself, but when the 3000XT was tried without plugging in the power supply unit, it just sat there, recognizing the port as far as the power LED was concerned but failing to report for duty in Device Manager or My Computer.

With that attended to, the driver installed, and someone having previously formatted the drive under FAT32, all was well, and I was making data transfers to the drive within a minute or so. That’s how installing new hardware should be.

Devices

Additional devices report in Device Manager, and that’s further to the Firewire controller which reports separately.

The speed of operation was essentially the same as for the 3000LE – it’s still a 5400rpm drive, though with more platters to give the extra capacity - and in all aspects it behaved impeccably; quiet and relatively cool, if a little brick-like. This is not a diminutive device, and it’s not something you’d want to carry around a deal, but it’s OK for moving across to another PC in the office, or being carried in the car.

In conclusion

You might feel the urge to complain that the stated 160GB capacity is, as usual, something of a marketing ploy, properties showing 152 of your standard Gigabytes, but for anyone who needs appreciable external drive capacity, even at the price, this could be the device to have.

The model has the same external appearance as the 3000LE except the trim is black instead of red, and of course there are just the two Firewire ports and a power socket at the rear rather than USB 2.0.

Again we point out, don’t forget to demount the drive (via the Taskbar icon) before unplugging it or you risk blowing the controller. Firewire may be a hot-plug-in device but it’s not hot-unplug - for a disk drive anyway.

Don Bradbury

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