As I mentioned in my review, the first test sample of the OneTouch 4 Mini 320GB that I received had USB connectivity issues, so I had to request a replacement from Maxtor. Thankfully, they were kind enough not to ask for the dead drive back, so I had a chance to check out my suspicion that the problem was simply a failure of the controller card inside the drive enclosure, not the drive itself. If that was the case, I still had a perfectly-functioning 320GB 2.5" hard drive on my hands. I simply needed to extract it from its enclosure.
This is what I was up against. The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini enclosure has no visible screw holes, though around the bottom edge, there is a seam that suggests that the two halves of the drive come apart. A bit of experimental prying with my fingernails confirmed that this was the case, and I only needed to stick a flat object into the seam to get the enclosure apart. It didn't put up much of a fight.
The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini enclosure has a clamshell-style internal design that cradles the drive itself inside, with no fasteners whatsoever anchoring the drive to the casing. The drive is simply suspended in the middle of the enclosure by several foam rubber pads, which helps prevent the transmission of vibration, and was likely what contributed to the drive's almost imperceptible noise level -- I had to hold the drive right up to my ear to hear any noise at all. All the control circuitry for the drive and the USB port is hidden beneath a small RFI shield at the end of the drive where its SATA port is located.
The 2.5" hard drive in the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini isn't a Maxtor drive at all. It's a Seagate Momentus 5400.5, based on Seagate's popular Momentus 2.5" drive platform. The drive itself should have many more years of reliable service on it. Also, the drive is fully SATA 2.0 compliant. The appearance of a Seagate drive here isn't a surprise, since Seagate acquired Maxtor a couple of years ago, positioning the Maxtor brand in the lucrative lower end of the hard drive market.
Removing the metal shield from the bottom of the drive reveals a small PCB that plugs directly into the drive's SATA and power connections. This PCB doesn't even have a physical connection to the RFI shield -- it just hangs off the back of the drive itself. The SATA connections to the drive are soldered to the PCB itself.
Let me state that we don't advocate taking your hard drive apart on some idle Sunday, because you'll most assuredly void the drive's warranty. I just happened to have one that I couldn't use, and decided to attempt the experiment. Of course, the internal drive was in perfect shape, and it's now spinning happily away in my Gateway laptop, where it replaced an 80GB Fujitsu. Depending on how much Maxtor wants to charge you to recover data from the drive if you encounter a similar problem to mine, it may make more sense simply to take out the internal drive and buy an external 2.5" HDD enclosure.
