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Another Maxtor Bites the Dust

C

cy7878

Senior member
My newly installed maxtor 200Gb HDD suddenly failed. It was bought new last September so it's only 7-8 months old. This makes 3rd Maxtor I had failed in the last 2 years. Am I just unlucky?
 
Meh. Purely personal opinion. If you feel lucky (or unlucky, as the case may be), get another one. If not, then grab another brand...
 
I've had Hitachi, Maxtor and WDs fail for various reasons. Most of the time, I was doing something stupid and impatience is one. Take care of your hdds and they will perform reliably.
 
I've had 1 Quantum, 4 WD's, and 2 Seagates and none have ever failed.

My sister had a Toshiba in her Dell laptop that failed though.
 
In my experience Maxtor sucks. I've owned a few of them and every one of them craps out sooner than you would expect.

I'm using a Samsung drive right now and it is still going strong.
 
All drive makers have their good and their bad products. But I think it's pretty well acknowleged that there's been a problem with some recent Maxtor drives. Dell shipped a BUNCH of prematurely failing Maxtor drives with some of their workstations about two years ago. The recent big Maxtors have been especially subject to failure when overheated. I (apparently) melted a brand-new 250GB Maxtor when transferring Gigabytes of video to it with poor ventilation over the drive.

Maxtors are the ONLY recent drives where I've seen total, unwarned, drive failure. But, again, my personal experience does not mean much by itself.
 
In general.......

Maxtors
WDs
Hitachi
Seagate

This is the order from worst to best in terms of reliability.

Seagate has a long reputation of good drives, but 7200.8s are sh!tty. 7200.9s are in question and as are 7200.10. Reputation is dropping slowly. My own 7200.8 failed once (RMAed)

Hitachi? We're long past IBM 75GXP days so stop bringing that up. 7K250s are more reliable than 7200.8s, and we're waiting on T7K250. Overall, my 2 Hitachis are doing well.

Maxtors and WDs have crappy warranty.
 
Originally posted by: DLeRium
In general.......

Maxtors
WDs
Hitachi
Seagate

This is the order from worst to best in terms of reliability.

Seagate has a long reputation of good drives, but 7200.8s are sh!tty. 7200.9s are in question and as are 7200.10. Reputation is dropping slowly. My own 7200.8 failed once (RMAed)

Hitachi? We're long past IBM 75GXP days so stop bringing that up. 7K250s are more reliable than 7200.8s, and we're waiting on T7K250. Overall, my 2 Hitachis are doing well.

Maxtors and WDs have crappy warranty.
Click to expand...

Seagate bought out Maxtor. *shrugs*

...Galvanized

 
I've never had a problem w/ Maxtor drives, and i've owned several as well as Seagate and WDs. So have i been lucky or are have you been unlucky? Hard to say, but if i had the same problems you have had w/ one particular brand or another, i think i'd take a break and try a different brand. Hitachi, Seagate and WD are all solid drives.
 

i'm still working on my first cup of coffee. not ready to count hard drives.

i think it's important to run the HD at a low temperature. no, not recommending the liquid nitrogen treatment. just saying that, just because they're "specced" to some high temperature, doesn't mean you need to let them run hot.

one hard drive in an acrylic case - not a big deal.

2 maxtor 160 GB P-ATA in a shuttle SFF case - they were getting toasty. BUT - the cage they're in is mostly aluminum. with a little AS ceramique (so that the HDD conduct heat to the alum. frame), and a small HSF on the outside of the alum. cage - and the 2 HDD's which were running hot, are cool to the touch.

i think you should treat your HDD's like a CPU or graphics chip. i don't mean overclocking, i mean, take measures to keep them cool.

so far i've been able to do this without buying one of those specialized HDD coolers.
 
Anecdotal reports suggest that the dmax9 series have more problems than other brands. I'm not sure how dmax10 stacks up. The previous maxtor 540 series was excellent.

 
Maxtors and WDs have crappy warranty.
Click to expand...

5 year warranty with my Maxtor or is it with Seagate now 😉,never had a Maxtor or any of my previous other brands(including Maxtor again) fail yet.

HDs will fail and you will always get somebody posting brand X fails again etc.... to be honest any drive can fail and no real proof IMHO that brand xxxxx is superior to brand B.

In the end we just buy what we like and think is best,posting threads like this is pointless since you can find both good and bad experiences with any brands.

 
Only two drives ever to die on me were Maxtor's... one within a week, the other within a month. That was 2 years ago, and since then I've blacklisted them.

Doesn't mean my current WD's and Seagate won't die, but everyone has bad experiences with a particular manufacturer.

Best defense is a backup.

 
Originally posted by: PhoenixOrion
magic 8-ball says....yes.

i've bought several diamondmax 9 and 10. all of them are still going after many years.
Click to expand...


same here. No problem with the maxtors I had in my Rig.
 
Maxtor drives at one time were real junk drives (five-six years ago). They seem to be much better now days.

I have always been a WD man myself, and have yet to have one fail on me.

I still have old 1-6GB WD drives sitting around my house that work fine, just no use for them anymore.
 
I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum with my Maxtor luck. I've used them for years and can't remember the last time I had one fail, but I can tell you I've had 3 out of 6 Seagates bite the dust. My last few Maxtors are louder than I like. I can hear them thrash from across the room and now use Samsung. Very quiet and they perform quite well.
 
Every company has their share of hard drives that go bad. Back in December I replaced drives for people - an IBM that had physical damage to the disk, a Samsung that had the smart diagnostics giving an alarm, and a Seagate that had trouble spinning up. Then in February I replaced a damaged Maxtor for someone else.

And this Maxtor too was a 200gb drive - but I'm thinking the problem is the power supply, as since we've had a stick of ram and a dvd burner fail in the machine.
 
Never had a drive die. Two Maxtor 80GBs still going strong even given the late 2002 and early 2003 production date.
 
I dropped a WD down 5 steps stair.. and it still works!!! It didn't just fall flat on carpeted steps, it went down like a slinky on tiled steps. I couldn't believe it, i ran all sorts of HDD tests i could find, but nothing came up as wrong, not even a lost cluster. I decided to test it by ghosting my OS right onto it, but it's been literally 2 weeks now, and it hasn't crashed or even hiccup. Maybe i dreamt i dropped the drive.

I've had MANY HDDs over the years, and coincidentally, only my Maxtor's died. Even my IBM Deskstars... the old 60GXB or whatever they were called, you know, the notorious one with the click of death... well, both of those drives still work even after... what is it now, 8 years? One of them has been doing the click of death for at least 5 years now, but it still hasn't died!

We had 6 120GB Maxtor's at work in a RAID5 configuration... 2 out of the 6 died, so we took them out and replaced it with WD.

The only drives i haven't tried are Seagates (well Samsung too, but drives are so cheap these days, i see no reason risking it on that), but if i ever need more HDD space, i'm definitely going to try them next. I'll be hooking up another 5 HDD RAID5 array sometime today hopefully (Hitachi's 7K250).

The only good thing with Maxtor drives is the RMA is very easy... at least compared to IBM. IBM wants you to box it up VERY specifically... i never bothered after hearing what they required... the drives still work, even though the click is annoying as hell.
 
Seagate bought out Maxtor which bought out Quantum. Quantum made interesting drives too. Now that Seagate has their SCSI division I wonder what's in storage for the future. I want to get my hands on a Cheetah 15k.5 drive especially. Probably U320 as I don't have any SAS hosts worthy of such a beast.
 
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