Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Burned by the Fine Print
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 11:00 AM
Before I purchase a technology product, I normally do a fair amount of research to make sure it's exactly what I'm looking for. Specifically, I look for reviews, read the online manuals, and scour over the specs. However, every so often I'll buy something on first impressions without doing the research, largely on the hunch that it will do what I need. Sometimes that results in me getting burned; this is one of those times.
I needed a large external hard drive, specifically for storing images of my PCs created with Acronis TrueImage. These images are often in the 20 to 40 GB range. I had initially purchased a 300 GB hard drive and an external enclosure, but upon seeing the Maxtor Shared Storage drive, I thought it would be more advantageous to have a large drive that any of my computers could access over the network. Of particular interest to me was this feature as mentioned on the Maxtor site: "2 USB ports let you add shared printers or extra drives". The idea of adding two more external drives and having a massive gob of network-based storage sounded great. So I bought it.
I've been having my office renovated and as such my work life has been in chaos (you've probably noticed the slowdown in posts here lately). That also means I haven't been properly set up to use the Maxtor NAS drive until recently. I took a 300 GB external hard drive and connected it to the Maxtor NAS, excited that I was going to have 600 GB of storage available anywhere on my network. I was confused when it didn't work, so I started reading through the manual and came upon an ugly bit of information: only FAT32 formatted drives are supported. This immediately put a kink in my plans, because FAT32 only supports file sizes up to 4 GB in size. What I didn't immediately realize was the real show-stopper: FAT32 partitions are limited to 32 GB in size, meaning I'd have to take that 300 GB drive and hack it up into nine different partitions. Ridiculous! Who uses FAT32 any more? It's an antique format and wholly inadequate in our world of 100+ GB hard drives.
Nowhere on the Maxtor product page or on the product page of the store I bought it from is this mentioned. A massive limitation like this should be listed immediately after the external hard drive feature is mentioned. Because the store I bought it from only has a seven day return policy and I didn't discover this until day 38, I'm stuck with this product I spent $459 CND on and can't use in the way I wanted to.
The Maxtor NAS itself is an impressive product, and I imagine I'll still get some good use out of it, but I feel burned by the fine print. Has anything similar happened to you?
UPDATE: Thanks to some helpful comments from readers, I was able to get the external drive formatted in FAT32 using a bootable CD (Acronis Disk Director) and can now access it from the Maxtor NAS. The 4GB file limit is still there, which is irritating but not a show-stopper. I still stand by my assertion, however, that Maxtor needs to mention the FAT32 limitation on their Web site.
I needed a large external hard drive, specifically for storing images of my PCs created with Acronis TrueImage. These images are often in the 20 to 40 GB range. I had initially purchased a 300 GB hard drive and an external enclosure, but upon seeing the Maxtor Shared Storage drive, I thought it would be more advantageous to have a large drive that any of my computers could access over the network. Of particular interest to me was this feature as mentioned on the Maxtor site: "2 USB ports let you add shared printers or extra drives". The idea of adding two more external drives and having a massive gob of network-based storage sounded great. So I bought it.
I've been having my office renovated and as such my work life has been in chaos (you've probably noticed the slowdown in posts here lately). That also means I haven't been properly set up to use the Maxtor NAS drive until recently. I took a 300 GB external hard drive and connected it to the Maxtor NAS, excited that I was going to have 600 GB of storage available anywhere on my network. I was confused when it didn't work, so I started reading through the manual and came upon an ugly bit of information: only FAT32 formatted drives are supported. This immediately put a kink in my plans, because FAT32 only supports file sizes up to 4 GB in size. What I didn't immediately realize was the real show-stopper: FAT32 partitions are limited to 32 GB in size, meaning I'd have to take that 300 GB drive and hack it up into nine different partitions. Ridiculous! Who uses FAT32 any more? It's an antique format and wholly inadequate in our world of 100+ GB hard drives.
Nowhere on the Maxtor product page or on the product page of the store I bought it from is this mentioned. A massive limitation like this should be listed immediately after the external hard drive feature is mentioned. Because the store I bought it from only has a seven day return policy and I didn't discover this until day 38, I'm stuck with this product I spent $459 CND on and can't use in the way I wanted to.
The Maxtor NAS itself is an impressive product, and I imagine I'll still get some good use out of it, but I feel burned by the fine print. Has anything similar happened to you?
UPDATE: Thanks to some helpful comments from readers, I was able to get the external drive formatted in FAT32 using a bootable CD (Acronis Disk Director) and can now access it from the Maxtor NAS. The 4GB file limit is still there, which is irritating but not a show-stopper. I still stand by my assertion, however, that Maxtor needs to mention the FAT32 limitation on their Web site.
