Maxtor's latest external hard drive is essentially the USB2.0 version of a previous Firewire model. Can the newer interface stand up to the established speed king?
While advances such as 60GB notebook drives will certainly impact the way notebooks are used in the future, at the moment there's only one way to enhance the storage capabilities on notebooks, and for that matter, locked down desktop systems, and that's with an external drive. Maxtor's Personal Storage 3000LE is essentially the USB2.0 version of the Personal Storage 3000XT we've previously looked at, albeit with a smaller 120GB drive tucked into the chassis. Does the inclusion of USB2.0 add significant new functionality that the Firewire variant lacks?
Maxtor sell two drives under the Personal Storage 3000LE branding. The smaller drive is only 40GB and sells for AU$499. Given that the 120GB version is three times larger and only AU$300 more, it's tough to recommend the smaller drive. 120GB is just much more appealing than 40GB. We note that the box recommends the 3000LE as "ideal" for storing your MP3 collection. That's probably true, but anyone with 120GB of MP3s is probably just waiting for the copyright police to come knocking.
From a technical perspective, the only real difference in the drives that come with the 3000XT and 3000LE is the size. They're both 5400RPM drives with 2MB caches, and theoretical limits aside, the performance of USB2.0 versus Firewire should be all but negligible.
Physically the 3000LE is identical to the 3000XT, but in red plastic rather than blue. The drive itself sits in the middle of the chassis and is easy to see. We're somewhat worried by the plastic chassis, which is quite flexible. It certainly makes the drive portable, but not as rugged as its size might imply. Power is supplied by an external cable; while USB is capable of powering devices, you wouldn't want either a surge or lull in the power to a hard drive.
Maxtor supplied us with a USB2.0 card for the purposes of this review, but any card that complies with the standard should be able to handle everything that the 3000LE wants to dish out. While the USB2.0 card needed drivers to work on our test system running Windows 2000, the 3000LE itself installed without the need for extra drivers. Maxtor supplies a CD of Windows and Macintosh utilities as well as a driver for anyone running Windows 98. The Windows utilities allow the drive to spin down after a predetermined period; this should potentially extend the drive life by reducing wear and tear.
We tested the 3000LE with some simple file transfers, and were pleased with the results. A collection of files totaling 2.75GB took just over 3:20 to transfer. That equals out at over 13MB/sec, a very good figure indeed. Things got better with a compressed 2.6Gb file, which took 2:45 to transfer on our test system, for an average of just under 16MB/second. These are different tests to those performed on the Firewire drive, but show the 120GB drive at least keeping pace with its larger Firewire cousin.
One of the real hooks for purchasing a USB2.0 drive is the backwards compatibility with existing USB1.1 hardware. Virtually any machine still running that you connect the 3000LE to is going to have USB ports, so moving data around from site to site is a definite possibility. This is a real plug in the 3000LE's favour; unless you're working almost exclusively with newer Apple machines, you're unlikely to find the same saturation of Firewire ports. The rub, is, of course, the slower transfer speeds. From a theoretical point of view, the file transfers we did would take over two hours to complete under USB1.1. That doesn't make the USB1.1 implementation useless, just not terribly suitable for very large file transfers.
At the end of the day the 3000LE and 3000XT address slightly different large storage markets. The 3000XT will definitely appeal to the AV market, where Firewire is quite pervasive and the additional 40GB of space will quickly vanish in a flurry of rendering. The 3000LE is more of an enthusiast's storage device with an eye on portability. At AU$749 it's at an attractive price for a portable drive of its size, although only if you've already got a USB2.0 card installed.
Maxtor Personal Storage 3000LE
Company: Maxtor
Price: AU$749
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: (02) 9369 3662
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