Longmont (CO) - Maxtor today introduced its fourth generation external harddrive. The new drive builds on the One-Touch concept, which allows users to initiate backups by the touch of a button on the harddrive.

Maxtor’s OneTouch drive already was a fool-proof concept in the previous two generations and left very little room for significant improvement in this new model. Introduced with the "Personal Storage 5000" and most recently offered in the "OneTouch", the one-button-backup-idea has been wrapped in a sleeker casing and has received some additional features as well as more performance.

The drive now comes with a pre-configured backup schedule out of the box, which will "work for 80 percent" of users, according to Maxtor. The schedule still can be adjusted, but now is easier to use for the majority of users, a spokesperson said. Backups still work in a progressive way : Full backups are run only the first time of the schedule. Following backups only add or change files.

Completely new is the "DriveLock" feature, a password-based security function which will protect contents, if the drive is lost or stolen. The company said that it has looked into a fingerprint-based access limitation to the contents of the drive, however received negative user feedback on such a solution. "This is one more thing to break," the spokesperson said. Instead, the software-based protection was a "nice feature", which has not "added cost or complexity to the product."

Under the hood, the new OneTouch has received a slight speed increasing with platters now rotating at 7200 rpm instead of 5400 rpm. Offered capacities stay the same at 250 and 300 GByte. Integrated interfaces include IEEE1394 as well as USB 2.0. The performance of the new drive is rated at an average seek time of 9 ms and sustained transfer rates at 34 MByte/s for USB 2.0 and 41 MByte/s for IEEE1394. Suggested retail prices are $330 for the 250 GByte version and $380 for the 300 GByte model.