Review on 💾 Maxtor 80 GB Personal Storage 3100: Reliable & Portable External Hard Drive by Noah Trigg

I purchased this hard drive in February 2005 and it died a slow and painful death in early December 2005. Pros: When it worked, it ran very smoothly. I connected it to a Dell Dimension 4550 (2.5GHz with 1GB RAM). It was connected to a USB 2.0 port. I used it as a backup. Lately I've been storing music files (mostly mp3s), graphics (mostly jpgs) and it's been very quiet and fairly fast for most files, although it seems to choke on large files like videos. Access times were also acceptable. Cons: The disc only lasted 9 months. Gradually it started to fail giving me time to start backing up the files I had stored on it. Copying files and accessing files is taking more and more time. However, my computer ended up not being able to recognize the drive at all. I don't think I abused the drive as I only wrote to it once a week and never moved more than a few gigs at a time. The Maxtor website offers a diagnostic tool to evaluate the drive. This analysis revealed that the drive needed to be replaced. I was very disappointed that it died as it was very convenient to back up my files to HDD instead of HDD.