Seagate Maxtor One Touch 4 Mini 250GB USB2.0 Portable Hard Drive

Comment:
Bought this on sale for $69.99 during one of the weekly specials. Plugged it in and it worked fine on all of my computers (XP & Vista), but note you need to have TWO USB ports free (and near each other) in order for this to work, which can be inconvenient sometimes. Haven't encountered any issues so far.

Comment:
I bought this to transfer large files between PCs that are not on my home network. On sale this was about $65 so it really beat out the current 32GB USB flash sticks on price per meg (and for performance).The unit is actually quite small, which is difficult to tell from the images on the product page.Plug-n-play on all of my computers went along flawlessly, with XP Pro, Vista Home Premium 32-bit and 64-bit all recognizing the drive right away.One small issue I ran into was that my HTPC won't recognize the drive on its front panel USB connections which are driven from the motherboard internal USB connectors (ASUS mobo and NMedia 5000 case). The drive just does a click-click sound, so my guess is that there is some power current requirement issue at play here. So I just plug it into the rear connectors.Be sure to make a backup copy of all of the Maxtor software that is included on the drive. The owner's manual also says to do this in small print.The drive transfers files quite fast, averaging 28MB to 32MB per second on my PCs when transferring gigs of large video files -- for both read AND write. Vista was slightly faster than XP.This performance is significantly faster than any USB flash drive I've ever seen (fast sticks usually do about 20MB/sec read and 5MB/sec write), so that's a good 6x faster writing.