Stay Away from Maxtor drives

[Guest capun]

Just to let you know this is the 3rd Maxtor Drive that has died on me in the last 1.5 years.

 

One was covered by the 1-year warranty, the replacement drive just died after about 10 months of use. Of course the replacement drive carries the old drive warranty (read it OUT). And your data? forget about it.

 

A third drive also died about 2 weeks ago and of course it is out of the 1-year warranty.

 

Two of the Maxtors were DiamondMax Plus 9 Ultra, 120 GB ATA-133's, the third if a DiamondMax D540X Ultra 160 GB

 

I have also seen a couple of customers where their external data backup (carried at Costco and other places) drives have died with the customer back-up data.

 

I 30+ years in the biz I have never seen such an appalling failure rate (Maxtor claims 1% failure rate, hah!), my trusty WD 60GB still are toiling around after 4+ years.

 

So if you have a Maxtor drive, I highly encurage to back-up your data frequently and stay away from them.

 

I am recommending my clients to stay away from the Maxtors and use WD or Seagate drives.

[+Spectre_USA 7]

This is why in my 20+ years of IT finagling, I have stuck with Seagate drives. My 1st one, chosen on a lark, was

a 20MB MFM for a 286. I probably still have it around somewhere.

 

It, and all others since, have been bullet resistant, so I have stuck with them...

[BUFF 8]

I would check the warranty dates

https://www4.maxtor.com/en/support/service/rma/create/

[Guest capun]

Buff

 

First place to check. Then call them with an error code. Still the same answer

 

As for the drives. I still have my WD Caviar's for more than 4 years, but with this game and all of the installs, add-ons, etc, I needed a bigger Hard Disk.

[Baron von Blutwurst 0]

Capun

It's funny you brought that up..My original Maxtor from 98 died a little over a week out of warranty..I've never bought another. My WD and Seagate drives are up to 8 years old and still kicking..I've gone thru more optical drives than hard drives...go figure..

[Guest capun]

Baron

 

Depending on your usage, getting a drive to last more than 5 years is good, some will last a lot longer.

 

IMHO it all depends in several things: Heat disipation of the enclosure, heat produced by the drive, model design and model manufacturing.

 

Older drives were simpler with slower platter rotation, less number of platters/heads and usually larger.

With the push to get more space & performance and the switch to cheaper manufacturing costs may be the cause of some of this problems.

 

Maxtors were not bad before, but with the current spate of problems I won't recommend them to my clients. It is like trust, very hard to get and very easy to loose.

 

BTW. Seagate recently bough Maxtor, so hopefully they can get some of their quality control people to straighten them out and not just crank lousy products with the Seagate name.

[meeware 0]

IMHO it all depends in several things: Heat disipation of the enclosure, heat produced by the drive, model design and model manufacturing.

 

Regular defragging can also help eek out the life of a flakey drive. If you've got maxtor now, and can't afford to upgrade just yet, spending a little time and effort on good housekeeping may be worth the while.

[CAPFlyer 0]

I've owned almost nothing but Maxtor drives for the past 10 years and have yet to replace a single one. The only time it's been replaced was when I got a bigger drive. I currently have a brand-new Maxtor 120 7200RPM drive in the computer that I got with my new machine, a second (identical) drive that I purchased with the machine before when I built it in 2002, and I've got a 40GB drive I bought bulk back in 2000. None have had a SINGLE problem. I even made the mistake of putting my computer too close to the magnetic base of my CB Radio antenna one day and thought I'd lost everything. Not so. I installed a "dummy drive" from a buddy who had Windows 98 on that drive, reset the drivers and a few other minor issues, and then rebooted on the 120 and surprise - didn't loose a thing!

 

If you guys are loosing your Maxtor's in a year, then you need to seriously do some analyzing of your enclosures becuase I'll almost garuntee that you're running them too hot or you've got interference (radio, electrical, or magneteic) that is causing the problem. I always had my computer setup to go into heat protect if the internal temp of the case got above 110* F, and that's always seemed to keep me from doing any damage to the internal components. Only had a computer heat protect once even at that, and usually I'm getting temps down in the 80-90 degree range, and I'm in the heat and humidity of Texas.