I needed more hard drive space on my Mac Mini and I got an unbudgetized income a few weeks ago so I bought myself this rather big and greenish FireWire hard drive. Getting it to work on Mac OS X was not as simple as plug & play and, as I found out this morning, mounting it isn’t obvious either. Bear with me for a sec as I disgress.

Working in the Linux environment for a few years, I tend to use encryption and strong passwords as often as I can, as long as it doesn’t create too much of a burden on my day-to-day activities. While setting up this new Maxtor external drive, I enabled the security option. This way, if somebody ever steal my hard-drive, accessing personal data stored on it will be much harder.

Note: This is sometime less true if the answer to the « I lost my password » question is a public information, like your mother’s maiden name, especially if the eventual data-thief knows you. It would be best go to with something along the line of « My favorite CareBear is… »

On a different but — you will see, bear with me — related stream of consciousness, there is one thing that distract me about this hard-drive; the front LED flashes when it falls in sleep mode. Somebody should have told the usability department at Maxtor that flashing lights distract users. When I manage to sit myself in front of the computer to write my next short story, the last thing I need is a blinking light that only tells « I’m not doing anything. » So I unmounted my external hard-drive and turned the power off.

When I sat down to manually complete the last step of my otherwise-fully-automated-weekly-backup this morning, I turned the power back on on my external hard-drive and waited for the icon to appear on my desktop… then I waited some more… and the icon never appeared.

It turns out the hard-drive will not be automatically mounted when you plug it in, even if its password is in you key chain. You cannot perform a manual mount command either. What you have to do for the icon to show up — and I hope it helps someone out there looking for this information — is to use the disk utility that you installed when you setup the drive. Now, what you need to do it not exactly obvious even when, after you launched the Maxtor utility, you hear the drive spinning and you see its icon in the list of connected devices. Select the device in the list and edit its settings (by clicking the edit button or double-clicking the list item. Navigate to the Security tab, enter the password and click the Edit security settings. As soon as you will have hit that button, the disk icon will appear on your Desktop. You actually don’t need to make any modification to the drive security settings.

Somebody once told me Mac computers were easy to use… I’m telling them to stay away from Maxtor’s external hard drives!

Here’s a few ideas for the usability team at Maxtor. My favorite solution would have been for the OS to remember the password (it’s stored in the Max OS X key chain anyway) and automatically mount the drive as soon as I plugged it in. If this can’t be done, I would at least have wanted the icon to be displayed on the Desktop and be prompted to enter the password when clicking on it. If this can’t be done either, the disk utility (either the one from Maxtor or the one built-in Mac OS X) should have had a clear and obvious Mount button. Having to click the Edit security settings button makes no logical usability sense at all.

Performance and price-wise, I’m really pleased with this Maxtor hard drive. The two problems I have with it are usability problems. They’re not that important, but they really annoy me!

Tags Technorati : mac os x | maxtor| one touch | external hard drive | firewire | password | security | usability

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Mac by Alexandre Lemieux