My dad got a Maxtor OneTouch II 250 GB external hard drive for Christmas. I'm the IT guy for my parents so my job was to set it up so that he could use it to backup his computer. Simple, I thought.
I plugged in the drive and installed the software. The drive was recognized, however, I couldn't get any farther. I read through the instructions on the website and the ones that came with the drive which told me to push the OneTouch button on the drive to activate it, but pushing the button did nothing. I could see the drive under computer management, but the drive was uninitialized and couldn't be initialized. When I browsed “My Computer” the drive was listed as a Maxtor Locked Drive. Grrrr..
So after fooling around with it for about an hour I gave up. I was basically locked out by the Maxtor DriveLock Security (nice). I think the problem was the button on the drive was faulty so it never allowed me to register the drive. My dad is taking the drive back to Costco to get a new one so hopefully I will be able to report that the new one works soon.
I have three Maxtor OneTouch drives, but this is my first experience with the DriveLock technology. I definately would recommend against buying a drive with this technology at this point. At the very least, Maxtor should ship the drives unlocked and only lock them at the user's request. To ship them locked puts the user at a greater risk of running into problems. That is my two cents.