We recently dubbed Maxtor the “master of disaster” for its excellent data backup programs and devices. The company’s new OneTouch 4 Plus is another hit. Like its little brother, OneTouch 4 Mini, this external storage drive packs SafetyDrill, Maxtor’s excellent catastrophic failure backup program.

Endowed with 500GB of drive space, the OneTouch 4 Plus can back up your system’s hard drive with lots of room to spare. The unit adds a FireWire connection to the mix as well.

SafetyDrill is the real draw, though. The program backs up all the information on your drive, including the OS, documents, applications, and invisible files like boot records that help the PC work. SafetyDrill’s main downside is that it works only with Windows XP and Vista, and then only on drives that are NTFS formatted. Mac users and those with older XP systems are out of luck.

The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus, a 7,200-rpm mechanism, is speedy, clocking in at 51 seconds to back up our standard test folder via USB using the included software and 48 seconds using Windows Explorer. FireWire times were a bit slower, at 1 minute 15 seconds, using the drive’s FireWire 400 interface.

If your PC runs XP or Vista, the OneTouch 4 Plus is an excellent backup drive option.

Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus
Price range: $200 direct
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