Maxtor Personal Storage 3000LE ReviewOctober 22nd, 2001
Pros: Inexpensive; massive storage; sturdy case; decent performance; USB 1.1 backward compatibility.
Cons: USB 2.0 adapter needed for USB 2.0 performance; no power switch; bulky; heavy; no Windows 98 Original support.
Verdict: Maxtor Personal Storage 3000LE -- the fastest USB hard drive we've tested to date -- is a big leap forward, thanks to USB 2.0.
USB has come a long way since its inception. Although most find USB an efficient way to connect wide variety of peripherals, it is lacking potential to attract consumers in the storage market. With the advent of USB 2.0, the $200 Maxtor Personal Storage 3000LE is the first USB 2.0 storage solution that gives a major boost to performance and, of course, capacity, but the catch is: you need to upgrade to USB 2.0.
Bulky, semi-transparent rugged case The Maxtor Personal Storage 3000LE houses a USB 2.0-to-ATA33 bridge that is connected to a Maxtor 5,400-rpm 40GB hard drive. It also draws too much power so it requires an external power source. Unfortunately, you won't find a power switch; so, you may have to unplug the drive so the disc inside can stop spinning. The unit weighs about 2 pounds, and the case is measured at 1.6 by 6.0 by 8.6 inches. For frequent travelers, the rugged Personal Storage 3000LE will add a lot of bulk and weight to your briefcase, but thanks to the hard plastic chassis, the drive can withstand some hard hits.
Plug and Go Installing the Personal Storage 3000LE to a USB 1.1 port is effortless. Being a mass storage device (MSD) compliant hardware and a trusted USB 2.0 hardware, the drive is recognized without a single glitch on any platforms higher than Windows ME. Windows 98 SE users will need to download extra driver from Maxtor website, though. MacOS 9.0 or higher are supported as well. The benefit of the Personal Storage 3000LE is that you can install it on USB 1.1 ports should you not have any USB 2.0 ports. This greatly eases file sharing with other computers. Unfortunately, with this kind of setup, you are stuck with a USB 2.0 hard drive crawling at 900KB/s at best.
Blazingly fast with a USB 2.0 PCI card Since the Personal Storage 3000LE omits a USB 2.0 PCI card, you need to buy a USB 2.0 PCI card to drive up to speed. Adaptec, Belkin and Orange Micro produce USB 2.0 PCI cards, which are retailed at around $70, and Maxtor also sells their own for $50. In our tests, the Maxtor Personal Storage 3000LE was connected to the Adaptec USB2Connect 3100 Card coupled with USB 1.0 driver on Windows 2000. It averaged an impressive 15MB/s throughput with CPU utilization at merely 4%, as reported by HD Tach 2.61. Copying 6000 files (534MB) to the external drive took just 2 minutes. The drive also managed to finish a 500MB single-file transfer in less than a minute. Repeating the same test when the Personal Stroage 3000LE was connected to a USB 1.1 port produced a result of 850KB/s. You won't want to go back when you see how much USB 2.0 improved on its predecessor. As a note, these results with the exception of the benchmark recorded on a USB 1.1 connection are on par with the Firewire Personal Storage 3000DV.
The Bottom Line Under $200, the Maxtor Personal Storage 3000LE is targeted at the budget-minded group. While its transfer rate is encouraging compared to USB 1.1 hard drives, you have to shell out another $50 and to give up another PCI slot for the card in order to gain the extra speed. If your PC has a FireWire port, then getting the firewire-connectable Maxtor Personal Storage 3000DV can save you some sunk cost of an add-on host adapter. Otherwise, the Personal Storage 3000LE is the solid choice for an external hard drive.
-- By Ian Chiu, Managing Editor
Where to buy Maxtor Personal Storage 3000LE?
User Review(s)
"That Maxtor 3000LE Problem" not a great solution - but my resolve was to take it out of its case and install it as an internal hdd. it works fine - and if your desperate to retrieve data its a definate answer - thumbs down to Maxtor....
'always look on the bright side of life' Life of Brian. From J Joyce, March 19, 2005
"Possible Fix Found" I may have found a possible fix for this maxtor drive problem. For me, it was the power supply(5000LE-120GB). The drive would not boot, but all the lights worked. Then, I bought a WD external as a replacement and connected the power supply from it to the Maxtor. Then, the maxtor booted. Strange, because the light was on with the old power supply, but somehow it was still defective. THe clicking/spinning noise is normal for this drive. It is just loud on spinup/bootup. My WD external is much more quiet. If you hear the noise when you turn it on, then it might be okay. If it is not recognized by the computer, then check the USB cable. If you don't hear the boot up noise, but see lights still, it is probably the power supply. Maxtor support is a big waste of time. The power supply is a third party product, and the same exact one came with my new WD external. MOst important, is not to bang the drive. That won't fix it and might utterly destroy it. Luckily, I didn't destroy mine before I found the problem. Good Luck. From Charles, January 09, 2005
"Same problem with XP" I have just recently had the same problem with XP--it just quit reading the drive, although it knows it is there. Just so you know you can get the data off the drive by hooking it up to another computer--I have a win98 computer and used it to back the stuff up. From Margot Heffner, November 02, 2004
""fix" for recognition problems?" For those of you who cannot get the drive recognised in XP or 2003, try using Disk Management in Computer Management. Here the machine will show the drive is connected but is not shown in Explorer. What you need to do here is to simply assign it a drive letter so it can be used! Unbelievably simple!
Hope this helps!
Uplah From Uplah, October 18, 2004
"Maxtor 3000LE Sucks...WinXP won't recognize" I have had nothing but problems with this drive ever since I bought it. It locked up in Win 98, so I transferred it over to my XP machine. It was even worse, but I had to use the new machine b/c the old one was too slow. I formatted it to NTFS style, which worked for about 6 months. Now, after I installed MS Service pack 2, it stopped being recognized again! Horrible! Unfortunatley, I had bought a Maxtor one-touch before these new problems. Now I have one horrible drive and another I am sure will break down in the future. Never buy Maxtor again! From Chad Malone, October 10, 2004
"Yes there is a problem somewhere..." How do. Here's my two peneth.
Everything worked great for a year on my Win98SE but when I moved over to my WinXP machine it soon decided to hide from Windows Explorer. Sys properties shows it's there but apart from that, there is no indication that it is... =(
Ths strange thing is it still works fine for my Win98SE machine...?
I think I'll need to get a different storage device to back up this storage device...!
Uplah From Uplah, September 21, 2004
"Absolutely Naffed Off" I bought a Maxtor 3000LE a few years ago and all was fine. Suddenly, a few days ago and for no aparent reason "My Computer" does not recognise the disk although the computer knows it is there. Maxtor tell me that the only way I can get the data off now is through a data recovery company. After enquiring this would cost near £1000 (STUPID) I had loads of Data on this drive. Photo's MP3 files etc. etc. and cannot access them. I am assured that the data is on the drive just that I cannot access it anymore because of some form of corruption. The only way forward now is for me to reformat the drive losing everything I had on it as there is absolutely no way I can afford to have the data professionally extracted. What an absolute joke. I am gutted because I had pics and video that meant alot to me plus Gigabytes of MP3's that I had recorded and spent ages tagging up (MONTHS). Don't touch this with a bargepole as I know I am not the only one this has happened to!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! From Stefan Clarkson, September 13, 2004
"3000L is Garbage" I bought it 8 months ago. It si recognized in Device Manager and everywhere else but in My computer. It comes with a 90 day warranty now. Maxtor knows it is grabage and they keep selling it. The customer service was absolutely the biggest arrogant ass and quite honestly enjoyed telling people, "Maxtor doesn't cover data loss". They promote data loss, they just don't pay you for your loss. Never buy Maxtor anything again. Read the threads above. This is proof they knew the drives were garbage but they continued to sell them. This is a conspiracy. From Steve, August 04, 2004
"dead after two years" I have a similar issue. The drive was near to filling up with data, and then suddenly it stops working. The drive had not been physically moved or anything like that. It simply stopped working. I tried it on another computer but it simply not recognised on the usb port. I am now going to try another cable to see if that makes any difference.
Suresh www.officespark.com From Suresh Patel, June 29, 2004
"Red light burns.. but still works on USB on Win98!" Hi folks, I have a Maxtor 5000DV 120GB of which after 18 months suddenly the amber/red light remained burning when plugging it into my laptop with XP. FireWire or USB, no difference, it made Explorer hang. I called Maxtor, but they said 'sorry man, drive's bust!' Just like that. All data gone, bloody %#*&@%&-ers!. I googled on the internet about this, and joined the ranks of disappointed Maxtor buyers. But wait! As a last resort, just for kicks, I tried it under Windows 98, and guess what? It still worked with USB, although very unstable! So now I am slowly but surely backing up all stuff on another hd, before it really collapses.. no clicking noise yet, please Gods keep it going for a little while longer! But I am still very curious what is the problem. One indication: At the shrum.net weblog (rehttp://weblog.shrum.net/?limit=20,10) is reported that for 137+GB drives it has to do with an Microsoft ATAPI hotfix and a new Maxtor driver.. he installed those and it worked for him. Not for me though.. so no more Maxtor for me, never. Ciao, Roel From Johann, April 28, 2004
"Nearly 2 years and all is well" Just to counter the complainers, I've had a 40GB 3000LE for about 2 years and no problems. I bought it because my employer at the time started getting "weird" - you know money trouble so the HR person shows up at your office door with a pink slip and takes your notebook some day. I didn't want all my PDA, music files and emails on the company notebook. The 3000LE has done well and allowed me to keep my "stuff" off the company notebook. It is 95% full now, so I am considering a 2nd larger (120GB?) model. From Lynn, March 15, 2004
"RE: Dead! Data lost!" I posted back on 11/28/2003 that my 3000LE started making a whining and clicking noise.
Sad to report that even my attempt to spend $1-2k on sending the drive to a data recovery company has failed. The company just called and told me that the top platter has visible damage. The tech was surprised. Asked if I had dropped the unit while it was running. Told him no. I just came home from work one day to find the device emitting a high pitch noise.
I lost loads of irreplacable pictures and video. Shame on me. From Chris, March 03, 2004
"Drive broken (alas)" Alas, my luck did not last long. Long enough to off-load some 50 GB of data to another disk (4 days at USB 1.1 speed), and then drive finally died alltogether (30GB gone). My luck: when I bought the drive, it came with a 3 year warranty. :)(Now it is 1 year) Just sent off my drive to Maxtor. Hope I will get mine back repaired (with my data), or a new one. I live in hope :) Go Maxtor Go. From Wim De Groote, February 19, 2004
"USB Cable broken after 1 Year" Here I was: thinking I was the next victim of the Maxtor 3000 disease: 5 days after your 1 year (!) warranty runs out, your drive stops working and starts ticking. It shows up in Windows device manager, but forget about a drive letter in Windows explorer. My drive was showing all the classic symptoms. Before I ran down to the store, I replaced the red-silver Maxtor USB cable with a plain withe (new) one... and all worked fine :) Let's hope my fortune continues for a while. (BTW: For hardware trouble you are on your own, no diagnostic software available from Maxtor.com - Thank You Very Much). You, my friend, are your best support :) From Wim De Groote, January 31, 2004
"Dead and data lost" This product (Maxtor Personal Storage 3000LE - 40GB) worked very well for 18 months. Then one day (yesterday) it just quit working all together. It started making that clinking noise that other folks have mentioned. When I look at it in the control panel (device manager), the device is recognized by XP but it says that the Device cannot start (code 10). It really stinks! - this seems to be the common theme from everyone I know who owns a Maxtor external drive. They work great for a while and then they just die. It is unacceptable to have a product like this one only last 1-2 years. Come on Maxtor - do you not know about reliability and quality assurance? One thing is for sure, I will NEVER AGAIN buy another MAXTOR product... From Manuel, December 25, 2003
We're currently upgrading our user review system; so we won't be accepting new reviews for now. Personal Storage 3000LE Specs
Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, MacOS 9.0
Capacity
40GB
Rotation speed
5400 rpm
Average transfer rate
60MB / sec
Seek time
24ms
Buffer size
2MB
Software
--
Internal drive type
--
Integrated battery
No
Extra?
--
Dimensions
--
Weight
0
Power source
Self-powered
Warranty
One year
Extras Turn on and off this self-powered device automatically with your PC.
Lost a USB cable? Get a replacement USB cable.
Running out of USB ports? Get an extra USB hub.
You may need a new USB card to achieve Hi-Speed USB speeds.
Confirm with our USB 2.0 FAQ if you have Hi-Speed USB on your PC.
