i won't be buying Maxtor drives anymore

[PresterJohn]

well, i've had 4 different maxtor drives die in the last year on me. a 20gb, two 40giggers, and a 60gb (that had only about 4 months of use!). both the 40gb drives started to develop the click and died soon after. all 4 drives were in different computers...3 of which were connected to UPS's, so i'm pretty sure the failures were not power related.

it's ironic because when some other people posted here about problems w/maxtor, i was always a staunch defender of the company. well i won't be buying maxtor any more...i'll be buying seagate or WD from now on even if they cost a few dollars more.

[lost-and-found]

I'm fearing soon there will not be a good company to buy from. IBM is out, Maxtor seems to be going the way of IBM according to you, and we'll see how long WD and Segate's quality will last.

[PresterJohn]

WD and seagate are still making quality drives.

i was buying the maxtors because i never had any problems w/their low density drives for the longest time and because they're usually the cheapest, and are found in just about all the comp stores around here. the seagates (imo the best drive) are a little harder to find.

just to refresh everybody's memory...maxtor was the first of the big three (maxtor, wd, seagate) who slashed what was then, the standard 3 year warranty to 1 year. after they did that, the other two manufacturers followed suit.

after all these failures, i now know why.

[vesther]

I'd personally stick with Western Digital Drives if I were you. Seagate is good, but if you want Serial ATA, I'd personally wait until the Western Digital version comes out. I had an IBM Drive 2 years ago and it died out. Now I have a Western Digital Hard Disk Drive, and it's been 1 year since I first purchased it, and I'm reporting no problems with it.

[jagnorm]

So far I am very pleased with WD. Not long ago I fried my WD HD, it was my fault. Western Digital repaced it no questions asked, I got a human voice on the phone right away that was very friendly. That alone sold me on WD.

[Cyberlore]

All I put in my computer is Maxtor. Never had a problem (currently have 2 40's, 1 80, 1 160) with any of them. The liquid bearing drives don't make too much noise when spinning, which is always a nice thing. The general concencious among the people I talk to is WD drives crap out early. Perhaps it's all in the luck of the draw...

[nukes]

I've had maxtor drives for nearly 8 years running fine. On 24/7 as well in my server (though that is only about 4 years old). it gets the online and offline smart tests run twice a week, and has yet to fail. The documents drive is also a maxtor and goes without bother.
IBM had some real bother with the 75/85gxp which was made worse by them denying the design flaw, but I would be happy enough to buy a 125gxp upwards. Seagate Barracuda's are great drives though. Get 4 of those in RAID and you won't look back.
One less known brand that I've never heard of any problems with is Excelstor. I've got a few 10/20/40 gb drives from them, and they do ok. Not the best performance but they're cheap. I guess I'll have to wait a few years on them before I can say for sure.
IMO its just bad luck when they die. You get people saying that Quantum, WD, Seagate and even Fujitsu are bad drives. Its not true, but there will always be some faliure rate. There isn't much can be done about it. I know it doesn't feel that way when it happens to you though, all too well.

[PresterJohn]

i know sometimes it's just bad luck, but 4 in 1 year is too much of a coincidence for me. maxtor is a popular OEM drive (hp, compaq,etc)...i see a lot of machines that come in for service that need hd replacement, but i used to chalk that up to the fact that the vendors use maxtor more often...now, i'm not so sure.

btw, i didn't mention that the maxtor drive in the HP machine at work (40gb) also just started to develop the click. won't be too long before that one goes belly-up, i think.

[The Real Bingo]

Thats a bummer...I ordered an 80 gb Maxtor for my new rig I'm gonna set up. It has a 3 year warranty, so hopefully it will either die before the warranty is up, or not die at all. We shall see....

[msterzer]

Are your hard drives getting their share of cooling air? I learned the hard way that these days with faster drives (RPM wise) cooling is a must. I think most people buy a newer faster drive and install it without another thought. Most computer cases don't direct air toward hard drives especially any drives mounted above the bottom one. When they are stacked one on top of the other with hardly any space between them the heat builds and don't go away. They need some breathing room and some help dissapatting (sp?) the heat. I think the old original slower drives were mounted in the bottom slot, never moved, and newer faster, hotter drives mounted in the next slot. And so on, and so on. Any way something to think and ponder about.