As hard drive capacities continue to rise, we need better ways to manage those large back up jobs. With current drive capacities sitting at the 300GB mark, even dual layer optical storage won't cut it for large back up jobs. In fact, you'll need around 65 4.7GB DVDs to back up the entire drive, and by the time blue laser drives become affordable, hard drive capacities will have leaped ahead even further.

One of the practical devices for large back up jobs are external hard drive drives, which not only offer competitive capacities, but are easily portable and perfect for offsite storage. Maxtor's OneTouch II is pitched squarely at this type of application and, as the name suggests, makes it easier with a single button for back up.

The drive has a healthy 300GB of space, comes in a stylish case, and is about the same size as a hardcover book. It's built tough too, encased in a hard metal alloy. There's no fan, but the conductive casing does a fairly good job of dissipating heat. The blue OneTouch button flickers omnipotently when the drive is in use, and when pressed, can execute a pre-configured action or bring up a dialogue box with several back-up options. The drive can also be configured to backup at set intervals with two different options: Comprehensive Backup, which creates a locked container of files; and a Duplicate mode which, while slower, allows you to browse through your backed up files.

Our tests on the drive using Drivespeed32 gave a 14.5ms access time, and a maximum speed of 35MB/s. This makes it a little slower than desktop speeds, but more than adequate for archival purposes.

At $499 it approaches the price of an internal drive of the same size, which is impressive considering that standalone external cases are worth $100 on their own without the drive. Overall, the good price makes this a solid external drive, but the drive's archiving features elevate this to a highly back up device.