An external disk drive with 3 connection interfaces (FireWire 400, 800, and USB 2), room to spare and the silence that goes with video and audio production. What more can you want? Good software perhaps? Or a ruggerised drive enclosure in silicon rubber that protects the disks inside against (some) shock? The OneTouch III Turbo 1.5TB has it all.

This disk tandem disk drive looks good, in its industrial design. It has power management built in, and the ventilator makes almost no noise --the noise that it did make on a particularly warm day, is a sort of rumbling, very deep and low bass sound. There are of course two disks inside the enclosure --two Seagate disks of 750 GB each. The OneTouch III Turbo has a large bright white LED button on its front bezel. This button can activate a program such as Retrospect or any other application you care to start when pushing this button.

On using the OneTouch III Turbo, this LED will also blink. Software in the box: Retrospect Express and a Control Centre program that drives all OneTouch disk drives. A driver that interfaces with the LED button is installed in the Mac OS X System folder. This Maxtor OneTouch Manager does its job without any glitches, and offers access to the drive preferences --the LED button, and RAID settings. It also enables you to start Retrospect Express with one (software) button, or to start a synchronisation process that keeps your system disk and the OneTouch in sync.

All this software power is useful, but I prefer using my disk drives “as is”. The only thing I used the Maxtor OneTouch Manager for, was to change the RADI setting from RAID 0 to RAID 1 and vice versa. The software will change the RAID setting, after which you will have to re-initialize the drive with Disk Utility. All your data will be lost by changing the RAID setting --this is the same with the Freecom DataTank I covered some time ago.

Excellent for Video-editing or Multimedia storage

I was very curious about the performance of the OneTouch III Turbo Edition 1.5TB. On a Power Mac G5, we know the FireWire 800 ports are not exactly well implemented for speed, but I managed to get a sustained throughput of 82MB/sec. I tested the drive with Intech USA’s ZoneBench utility, which divided this drive up into 7 zones and tested each zone’s speed for various file sizes.

The OneTouch III Turbo hooked up to the Mac with FireWire 800 was fastest when file sizes were between 50 and 100 MB --this is very good news for anything multimedia, and exactly what the drive is meant for. Videos, audio streams, large digital photographs; the OneTouch III Turbo will move them in and out quickly. Small files were not this drive’s strong point: the performance dropped to around 70 MB/sec --which is still good, but not its maximum.

As it is almost traditional, performance beyond 80MB/sec is impossible with the Power Mac architecture, so I believe what is on the box --that the OneTouch III Turbo is capable of a speed of 92MB/sec when hooked up to a PC or Intel Mac.

The most pleasing aspect about this drive is, just as with the Freecom I tested earlier, that it is very quiet. Even more satisfying is that it stays quiet, even after a couple of weeks intensive copying files back and forth when the ambient temperature rose to 27 degrees centigrade. The only difference between the Freecom and the Maxtor storage subsystem is that Freecom’s disk drives make an even lower sound than those of Maxtor’s when the temperature starts to rise inside the case. But the difference is marginal.

Conclusion: the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition 1.5TB is a dream device for anyone serious about audio, video and image file copying, and streaming.