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

Plugged in and recognized by WinXP, no problem - BUT: although this is supposed to be a USB2.0 drive, it seems to run at USB1.1 speeds even when connected to a USB2.0 controller connected. This drive is very slow. I have 1 megabyte per second (that's only 8 megabits per second, and USB2.0 can go up to 480 megabits per second). The 3100 drive should run fine at 10-20 megabytes per second, but it doesn't. It can be slowed down by a small 2MB cache, but this is a 7200RPM device and should run much faster when connected via USB 2.0. This drive appears to be a dog as others have reported. It was only $45 but I should have read the reviews first. I like Maxtor on other "bare drives" but this external USB had to remain on the drawing board. It takes 10 hours to back up my main 80GB system drive on this slow machine. That's ridiculous. So it's going back to my local computer/stationery store for a full refund. I'll take something else that works faster. My recommendation: Only buy this drive if you need temporary external storage where speed is not an issue. You *do not* want to use this device as a backup drive for a large primary drive in your system.