💾 Maxtor 80 GB Personal Storage 3100: Reliable & Portable External Hard Drive Review

I have a Dell Dimension 8400 with 1GB memory and 100GB internal hard drive. Pentium 4. Windows XP Professional. When I connect this Maxtor device to my computer, the drive is recognized but my network adapter is no longer recognized. After a lot of troubleshooting and searching for help on the Maxtor website, a problem emerged: Personal Storage 3100 is not compatible with Intel 82801 chipsets! I'm not sure, but I think the 82801 is already a pretty standard chipset. Don't buy this drive if you…

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:

I've had this drive for about a month now. I use it with my laptop to increase my storage capacity. Immediately after plugging it in, I noticed that it's formatted in Fat 32. I think that's the reason for all the bad reviews. I reformatted it to NTFS and had no problems. It's faster than my laptop's internal hard drive. It runs silently and is very easy to use. Simply drag and drop files. Reformat this drive and you'll be just as happy as I am. I'm sure it will last as long as I need it. I…

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

I just noticed the bad reviews on this and thought I'd take a moment to share my experience. I can't remember how long I've had this hard drive, but I know it's been a while, but it worked the way I wanted it to - I backed up my files. It's quiet, stores a moderate amount of data (there's not much of it, requires frequent backups), plays HD movies without stuttering, transfers large files with ease, what else can it do? Very happy with my price. -To use. Although the next drive I buy will be…