What happened to Maxtor

[geepondy]

Yes, I did do a Google search but I don't see much info. Ten years ago when I worked at a shop, Maxtor's were just as popular as WDs in our systems and that was all Staples sold. I thought maybe they had gone out of business but I do see a couple of internal drives on their web site but only one offering from NewEgg and no mention from Toms anymore. What caused the drop in product offerings and popularity?

 

[Elixer]

Seagate bought them out.
Maxtor is Seagate's 'low end' now, but those still have Seagate drives in the boxes.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: geepondy
What caused the drop in product offerings and popularity?

Poor quality and bad performance. I personally had a couple of Maxtor drives go bad on me. I haven't had any other hard drives break down on me.

I say let Maxtor die a slow and painful death. They may actually be to blame for the poor Seagate quality lately.

 

[Elixer]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: geepondy
What caused the drop in product offerings and popularity?

Poor quality and bad performance. I personally had a couple of Maxtor drives go bad on me. I haven't had any other hard drives break down on me.

I say let Maxtor die a slow and painful death. They may actually be to blame for the poor Seagate quality lately.

I doubt that. Seagate is just cost cutting too much.

I still have a few Maxtors still kicking strong, even after 7 years now.

It looks like no matter who the maker is, someone always has a bad experience with whatever brand.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: SickBeast
Poor quality and bad performance. I personally had a couple of Maxtor drives go bad on me. I haven't had any other hard drives break down on me.

That by itself doesn't mean much. Just reading on these forums, seems like half the people who have had HDD problems have had problems with only one brand (but can be any brand). I don't know why this is, but it happens all the time.

Originally posted by: SickBeast
I say let Maxtor die a slow and painful death. They may actually be to blame for the poor Seagate quality lately.

Actually Maxtor "branded" drives are rebranded Seagates. I have one here, a 500GB Maxtor which looks like a Seagate and at the bottom of the label says "7200.10."

 

[geepondy]

When I was working at the computer shop, I learned not to have brand loyalty. Both WD's and Maxtor's failed at an equal rate. The good news was that both were very good about returning the failed drives and cross-shipping a return. I too have an old Maxtor and an old WD that are still going strong just as I have had both failed. An interesting study would be overall has HD reliability improved over say ten years ago?

 

[Leyawiin]

Independent Maxtor was fine - used them for years with no issues. I wouldn't buy them now - the real Maxtor died three years ago.

 

[RebateMonger]

While experiences with hard drives are never universal, it's pretty widely acknowledged that Maxtor drives built in the 2002-2005 time frame have a much higher failure rate than other maker's drives. They'll join Seagate's ST251 (44 MB) drives, WD's 1.6 TB drives, and IBM's DeathStars in the "Hard Drive Hall of Shame".

 

[geepondy]

I recall about ten years ago, our IT department had bought a bunch of Quantum, what where they called Fireballs? In a year's time about half of them had died.

I installed a 40 gig Maxtor in my Dad's computer, probably within that time period you have mentioned and it's still working ok but it's the loudest drive I have ever encountered. The chattering is worse then a bunch of squirrels.

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
While experiences with hard drives are never universal, it's pretty widely acknowledged that Maxtor drives built in the 2002-2005 time frame have a much higher failure rate than other maker's drives. They'll join Seagate's ST251 (44 MB) drives, WD's 1.6 TB drives, and IBM's DeathStars in the "Hard Drive Hall of Shame".

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: geepondy
I recall about ten years ago, our IT department had bought a bunch of Quantum, what where they called Fireballs? In a year's time about half of them had died.

Maxtor purchased both Miniscribe and Quantum in the '90s. Miniscribe was once a maker of really good drives (I owned serveral in the 80's), but quality fell to the basement near the end of its history. Employees swear that they were told to ship returned drives back out the door as "new" drives without repair. Others claim that Miniscribe shipped boxes containing bricks out the door to make their shipments look good for Year's End financial reports. The "brick story" was reported in the Wall Street Journal in late 1989.

Here's a photo of the Miniscribe model that was in my first personal IBM AT-clone computer.

The only Quantum I ever personally owned failed in a couple of months, but I don't have lots of experience with them. Dell reportedly replaced A LOT of Maxtors in the 2004-2006 timeframe in their business computers. I own (and still use) many drives from that timeframe, but all of my Maxtors are dead or dying.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: geepondy
When I was working at the computer shop, I learned not to have brand loyalty. Both WD's and Maxtor's failed at an equal rate.

That's been pretty much my experience. ALL brands will fail. Eventually.

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
While experiences with hard drives are never universal, it's pretty widely acknowledged that Maxtor drives built in the 2002-2005 time frame have a much higher failure rate than other maker's drives.

I think those were the "slim" maxtor drives with the round label.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Yeah, there was a reason they called them "fireballs".

 

[Minjin]

Every Maxtor hard drive I've purchased in the past 8 years is still in service and working great.

 

[TemjinGold]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
While experiences with hard drives are never universal, it's pretty widely acknowledged that Maxtor drives built in the 2002-2005 time frame have a much higher failure rate than other maker's drives. They'll join Seagate's ST251 (44 MB) drives, WD's 1.6 TB drives, and IBM's DeathStars in the "Hard Drive Hall of Shame".

Do you mean 1.6 GB? I don't think WD has 1.6 TB drives out and certainly not long enough to fail in droves yet...

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: TemjinGold
Do you mean 1.6 GB? I don't think WD has 1.6 TB drives out and certainly not long enough to fail in droves yet...

Embarrassed. Yeah, I meant 1.6 GB.

 

[CptCrunch]

I had one maxtor 15GB drive on me in 9 months time, and another drive (300GB) that has been going strong for 6 years now. I've also had a seagate 500GB 7200.10 die after 3 months of usage and some older WDs finally bite the dust.

All in all, I found WDs to be most reliable in my personal experience, but I buy so few hard drives that my stats are skewed.

 

[Elixer]

Quantum SCSI HDs were pretty good quality. Over 60 of those in a DEC setup, and they lasted 4 years before the company replaced the whole setup with a different vendor, they went with Compaq, and I forget what HDs they used.