As mentioned in the previous Time Machine - Cost Saver article, large external hard drives are a must to use Leopard's new Time Machine. Drive capacity should be at least twice the capacity of the drive you are trying to back up and use the fastest interface your computer can muster (FireWire 400 or 800).

As mentioned in the last article, CompUSA had a Maxtor OneTouch III ONE TERABYTE drive for US$289 after an instant $100 instore rebate. Well after standing in line at Staples this Black Friday morning they passed out a flyer that has that exact same drive for US$289.98 after a US$110 instant in-store rebate. This special price is only good for November 23 & 24. So if you have not taken the plunge to start your Time Machine backups, today or tomorrow might be the day to take that step and save a c note plus ten greenbacks in the process.

UPDATE: A reader commented on poor reviews for this drive so I researched the review status of the Maxtor One Touch III 1TB and yes I did discover a large number of bad reviews by users, The publication reviews and benchmarks were all very positive. What I did see and will report on is the fact that the vast majority of the bad reviews were from PC users who were either using USB or Firewire 400 because they could not get a third party FW800 card to work properly in Windows. The remainder of bad comments came concerning the bundled software, we don't care, this is going to be a Time Machine backup drive. The only valid concerns I did read and will pass on is that one customer had a drive that deep sixed after one month and there were several reports of poor customer service. That's pretty much the bottom line on reviews. One word of caution the drives (There are 2 500GB) they are RAID 0 Mac Formated which means that the drives are written alternately to provide maximum data throughput. That in turn means if one of the two drives fails, as with the reviewer who lost his drive after a month, all data is LOST. The drive can be reformatted to RAID 1 which is mirroring then each drive is written separately with identical data and now you will only have a 500GB backup drive. Unfortunately the Maxtor controller does not indicate when a drives dies. If the RAID 1 formatting is done, if it can, via Apple's Disk Utility then Apple's software will alert you to the drive failure.
Although the Staples sale ends Saturday night, November 24, at Midnight you might want to keep your eyes open for other sales during the Holiday buying season. FYI this drive originally sold for $900 back in Feb 2006 when it was introduced.

Let us know what you think and other sightings over in the comments and forums.