Seagate launch the Maxtor OneTouch 4 series of external HDDs

Looks like the marketing department at Seagate have been working overtime and have come up with the next generation of Maxtor OneTouch storage units to be unleashed on the world. There are three flavours of unit, the secure Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus ranging in capacity from 250 GB through to 1 TB, the also secure yet portable OneTouch 4 Mini (80 GB to 160 GB) and finally the OneTouch 4 for everyone who doesn’t care who sees their files, ranging in capacity from 250 GB to 750 GB.

The drives sport an intriguing design that initially reminded me of building blocks for a space station from a 70s sci fi TV series, but on closer inspection do look quite snazzy and would not look out of place on your desk.

The secure units feature the Maxtor SafetyDrill software, which allows complete recovery of your hard drive’s contents if it goes belly up. Simply boot the stuffed PC from the supplied SafetyDrill Recovery CD and the software restores your PC’s drive using the data on the OneTouch drive - simple, eh?

Again both the OneTouch 4 Plus and Mini have a password protected folder to store secret squirrel data in and there’s also Maxtor DrivePass firmware, which restricts access to vital files if the hard drive is removed from the unit and attached to another PC.

Here’s a list of specs for each of the units for you to have a quick look at

All units play well with both Windows XP upwards PCs and Mac OS X (10.4.7 upwards) machines with the MSRP pricing as follows - OneTouch 4 $99.99 for 250GB, $169.99 for 500GB, and $269.99 for 750GB, OneTouch 4 Plus $129.99 for 250GB, $199.99 for 500GB, $289.99 for 750GB and $359.99 for 1TB, OneTouch 4 Mini $99.99 for 80GB, $119.99 for 120GB and $149.99 for 160GB - all prices USD. And they are all available at the Maxtor store now, apart from the 1TB beastie which will make an appearance in October.