Perhaps you like LP have a day job where you need to shift large files from machine to machine and despite your healthy lifestyle and rigorous adherence to the motto "my body is a temple" find it impossible to make 20 trips with a 1gb USB key between buildings.

So why keep on fighting when the Maxtor OneTouch can solve this little dilemma with a whopping 250gb USB / Firewire storage device. Sure its not going to fit on your keyring but the 7200 RPM disk clad inside the stylish blue and silver case can hold 250 times the amount on LP's USB stick and the price per gigabyte is amongst the cheapest storage deals around, for about the same price of a 1gb memory stick you get a 250gb Maxtor drive with a USB 2.0 / 1.1 connection and a Firewire port with an 8mb cache buffer for maximum disk read write performance.

LP's everyday job keeps him in contact with Maxtor's professional disk products and they prove to be very reliable in mission critical applications and the same (although domestic level) technology is used within the Maxtor OneTouch units. With 250gb on tap you may worry about data throughput but the OneTouch can sustain 34MBps of data transfer via the USB connection and 41MBps on the Firewire interface, so getting files on and off the disk is a speedy operation.

Supporting both the Windows and Apple OS platforms the Maxtor OneTouch has a few nifty features for backup, which is the primary use that we had in mind for the unit. Simply install the Dantz Retrospect Express software and a bit of configuration later its possible to assign the button on the front of the OneTouch unit to act as a backup button, with it set to copy files to the device with just OneTouch.

Many devices report to be windows plug and play but they rarely are, however we can report that the Maxtor USB connection can be used with Windows XP as easily as a USB memory stick. The package comes with both a USB cable and a 6 pin Firewire cable plus and AC adaptor and power lead as the Maxtor unit does require external power and cannot run from the USB or Firewire power available. We half expected the Maxtor to be a noisy but again we were proven wrong, while its not silent operation, even when copying at full pelt it barely rises about a gentle hum, in fact it was easily outclassed on the noisy neighbour front by the Lordpercy.com shuttle PC!

As we said earlier this is not a USB key and it is a big lump at 41 x 140 x 210mm and weighing a chunky 1.38kg but it will only need the one trip instead of many, or it may just stay on your desk and backup a laptop or perhaps your MP3 collection, the OneTouch is a jack of all trades when it comes to storing large amounts of data.

Selling for £159 the Maxtor OneTouch offers the amazing price point of 64p per gigabyte of storage and you get a stylish quite device and free backup software bundled in, I'm not sure why it took us so long to discover the OneTouch but the days of trips across the car park with a USB key are numbered!

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