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MAXTOR can go to hell !!!! UPDATED

AnitaPeterson

AnitaPeterson

Diamond Member
Hello, AT users...

I just had another Maxtor drive quit on me. From now on, I'm going to avoid these pieces of crap like the plague. No more Maxtor in this house. It just hurts that I've lost so much time and money with them. At the beginning of April, an 80 GB just went to hell, and started clicking, and is no longer readable in any way. The sad part is that it was a replacement of a replacement of a replacement!

And today, another one crashed...

I mean, seriously! I bought this last drive - 160 GB - at a Christmas sale at Staples, last year - less than 6 months ago. It was connected through my on-board Promise controller on the Abit NSF7... and today, it just disappeared under Windows. After a reboot, Windows reported errors on the drive, and now I'm backing up about 115 GB out of the 130 gig of data which I had on the drive, because that's all that Ontrack Easy Recovery was able to find.

Maxtor can go to hell!

UPDATE:

The above was written on May 5th... today, May 30th, the 160 GB replacement I was sent by Maxtor ceased functioning. By the way, I asked for a DiamondMax Plus 10, instead of the 9 series.

The first installation went OK, I started using the HD immediately, and off-loaded about 45 GB on it, from my video capture drive, basically some audio and video content in several formats.

I launched Diskeeper, to defragment the older drives, and it analyzed all the HDs in the system, then did its work.

Last Saturday, I realised two things have happened: some audio files are corrupted and cannot be accessed or deleted, AND Diskeeper gives me an error message when trying to analyze the new HD. Ontrack Easy Recovery, launched in order to retrieve the remaining files, inexplicably quits to desktop every time the Disk Recovery is started, and shows me the drive has 128 GB of total space. I look at "My Computer", where Windows Explorer indicates the drive to be 156 GB...

I re-formatted the HD, and started using it again, this time I already fear it's defective, so I try to load some 100 GB via USB from two external HDs - again, audio and video files only.

Suddenly, several files give me an error message, and at first I believe it's from the external HDs, but about 30 minutes later I realized the problem is when I try to access files on the Maxtor...

By this time I know what's the next mmove: I reboot the computer, and when Windows returns, it informs me the HD needs to be formatted. I stop, put a diskette with PowerMax in the floppy, and the damn tests run perfectly... the HD passes all the tests.

Whe I reboot into Windows again, after Powermax has run its own reformatting, both the Windows Disk Management tool *and* EasyRecovery indicate the drive is 128 GB in size.

I can't wait to call Maxtor tomorrow...
 
yeah they company is in a lot of trouble.. financially i mean.. i think wider than expected lost last quarter..
 
If you've had that many die on you, odds are it isn't the drive, but something wrong with the rest of your system or some other external problem. That many aren't going to die on one person by coincidence, and if the drives were really failing at that rate due to design flaws Maxtor would have been out of business years ago.
 
We're talking about different computers here... I currently have two, and no way something's wrong with them... I have Seagates and WDs as well, why don't they also crash and burn?
 
Originally posted by: Pariah
If you've had that many die on you, odds are it isn't the drive, but something wrong with the rest of your system or some other external problem. That many aren't going to die on one person by coincidence, and if the drives were really failing at that rate due to design flaws Maxtor would have been out of business years ago.
Click to expand...

i can't see anything other than the PSU that could actually kill the hdd (other than improper handling or extreme temps).. if his PSU were bad it would probably be killing other parts as well...

its kinda like the lottery.. there is a very small chance you'll win, but someone has to win... i agree there is a very small chance of 1 person getting 5 hdds with short life-spans, but it has to happen sometime to someone.
 
It could be bad/unstable power in your house causing issues. The mechanical nature of hard drives make them more likely to be damaged by something like this than the other components in your computer.

Again, the odds of someone receiving 5 bad drives that didn't come from the same batch of drives that had a defect are astronomically high.
 
I've had WDs die on me as well. I undervolted one and overvolted the other (wrong power adapter for external enclosure, heh). Maxtor is most definitely crap, however. I have a 250gb HDD from them and it produces more heat than my CPU and VGA combined.
 
Something's wrong w/ your systema and it ain't the Maxtor HDs. Have used Quantum/Maxtor HDs in the past 6-8 years w/o any problems.
 
Originally posted by: Pariah
If you've had that many die on you, odds are it isn't the drive, but something wrong with the rest of your system or some other external problem. That many aren't going to die on one person by coincidence, and if the drives were really failing at that rate due to design flaws Maxtor would have been out of business years ago.
Click to expand...

I agree. It's one thing to have one or even two, die in a given time span, but if it's five in a relatively short period, then odds are, it's not a coincidence and there's something about your setup (or way of setup) that's killing them.
 
Overclocking and virus can ruin a drive too.

I had a few brand new drives get ruined by virus's at my moms company. Couldn't even do a low level format on them anymore.

And Overclocking can at least really mess up the data. But should be able to format I'd imagine.

Maybe you have a heat or vibration problem too.

The odds are to much against it being the drive and more likely you or your system or the environment it's in.
 
Originally posted by: tk109
Overclocking and virus can ruin a drive too.

I had a few brand new drives get ruined by virus's at my moms company. Couldn't even do a low level format on them anymore.

And Overclocking can at least really mess up the data. But should be able to format I'd imagine.

Maybe you have a heat or vibration problem too.

The odds are to much against it being the drive and more likely you or your system or the environment it's in.
Click to expand...

That's correct also. I've found that a high FSB w/o a PCI lock has been the cause of many HDD failures, optical drives too, but not as common.
 
well i agree with anita, i have had 4 maxtors die in less than 6 months, all from different builds and different customers....it aint no coincidence or external problem, they were refurbs and they were junk. period
 
I stopped buying Maxtor after my second one died. Back when they were Quantum/Fireball they were awesome. I still have 3 HDDs from that era that are kicking stronger than ever in some of my older machines. But my second HDD in my main comp is a Maxtor and it one day got slower than stink then started making the machine reboot, and the Mobo wouldn't see the HDD anymore. It still works, but it's junky as heck now. I just keep it around for cheap storage of unimportant files.
 
Originally posted by: allanon1965
well i agree with anita, i have had 4 maxtors die in less than 6 months, all from different builds and different customers....it aint no coincidence or external problem, they were refurbs and they were junk. period
Click to expand...


No way you got a crappy refurb omg. Never buy refurbs lessen the chance of a problem. Unless you like buying something someone else thought was broken and returned.
 
Originally posted by: BobDaMenkey
I stopped buying Maxtor after my second one died. Back when they were Quantum/Fireball they were awesome. I still have 3 HDDs from that era that are kicking stronger than ever in some of my older machines. But my second HDD in my main comp is a Maxtor and it one day got slower than stink then started making the machine reboot, and the Mobo wouldn't see the HDD anymore. It still works, but it's junky as heck now. I just keep it around for cheap storage of unimportant files.
Click to expand...

Amen. I have an old fireball in my rig (i havent upgraded in forever...), and it is still great other than it is a little noisy. The other 3 maxtors I have known had to be RMA'd one after another. I'll never buy another product from this company again. Nor Creative Labs, they screwed me over too with their crappy mp3 players. 🙁
 
I personaly have had pretty good luck w/ Maxtor but none of their recent drives, the last one I purchased was a D740X -L w/ fluid bearings and was a quantam design around the time they were bought out. Many people I know have had 120-250 gig drives just go belly up on them DM+8's through the newest Maxline 3's and die, most were out of warrenty due to the 1 year crap the HDD makers were pulling, but a few peeps got "servicable used parts" and those also tended to fail within 6 months a few also got new drives that work fine though.
 
I have several maxtor drives (10-120 GB) and I've only had 1 fail one me. I RMA'ed it and is being used in my system right now. It has survived about 4 new builds and still going strong.
for me its Maxtor or seagate>samsung>hitachi>western digital

I've had a couple of WDs go out on me. My last one would randomly not get detected by bios. For some unknown reason, i would power my computer up a hour or so later and it wouldn't detect. Then other times, it would work perfectly fine.
 
Sorry to hear about the data loss.

I really don't know if there is a "best" drive out there. Tons of people swear by Seagate but my luck with them has been almost as bad as your luck with Maxtor. Had 3 out of 5 Seagates either DOA or die within 6 months. I have several Maxtors now and a few WD's with zero problems. My primary drive of choice at the moment is Samsung. I went with the Samsung because it was quiet and had a 3 year warranty. After 10 months of use I can say that it is all I thought it would be..... so far. It could crap out at any time just like the Seagate so only time will tell.

About the warranty: I really don't care that much for them. It's not so much an indication of a solid drive as it is about marketing. Warranties are okay if you need a replacement in a hurry, but you still get a refurb'd drive as a replacement and my luck with refurb's over the long run has been horrible.
 
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