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Geek Culture / The beef against Maxtor... why?

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 01:00
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My PC has two Maxtor drives both coming up on four years. After disk analysis, no problems except slightly slow cache. My grandfather's PC with a two year old Western Digital drive recently failed, so I recovered his files. The analysis on his drive, however, was not so positive. 362 sectors had been allocated in just over 500 hours of running time! (Most of which was spent writing romantic novels.) My PC has been dropped, kicked and generally abused through housemoving. The first drive has run for nearly 2500 hours! The drives are still flawless. The Western Digital? Sat in the corner of a desk for two years. So why the beef against Maxtor I frequently see on these forums? In this case, at least, I see no reason as the Western Digital failed miserably in terms of reliabillity whilst the Maxtors continue to run. If anyone can point me to hard evidence of frequent Maxtor drive failiure, I'll believe you. But from my experience, I fail to understand the dislike of Maxtor around here.


Since the other one was scaring you guys so much...
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Agent Dink
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 01:13
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I don't know about modern Maxtor, but I had bad experiences with them about 10 years ago. We seemed to go through Maxtor drives like water, they were very temperamental. One of them died once because the computer was reset on accident in windows without a proper shutdown. Ever since I have been in charge of computer hardware at my house I've gone with Western Digital. Over the last 4 years I have yet to see one fail on me.

I have no signature...
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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 01:20
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I used to have a laptop with a Toshiba 260mb drive in it. Not only did it have hardly any storage capacity, but it failed. Frequently. And the only way to fix it would be a format, seeing as it was locked into the laptop.


Since the other one was scaring you guys so much...
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_Nemesis_
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Location: Liverpool, UK
Posted: 2nd May 2007 02:05
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Maxtor have always been fine for me. Running 3 Maxtor SATA drives atm and a Western Digital IDE. Last hard drive to badly fail on me (ie. hardware error, no fault of my own) was a Seagate, though I believe Seagate has now acquired Maxtor?

Eitherway, my personal experience with them has been fine and if I were to buy one now, I would not deliberately avoid Maxtor - I'd just get the one that was best value for money.

[url="http://www.devhat.net"]www.devhat.net[/url] :: Devhat IRC Network.
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GatorHex
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Location: Gunchester, UK
Posted: 2nd May 2007 02:21
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My bad experiences have only been with Seagates and iomegas jaz

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UnderLord
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 04:05
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I have never had a bad maxtor drive but then again i don't buy any other drives expect maxtor, there pretty nice, but each to his own i guess...

"I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road."
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Phaelax
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 05:45
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Maxtor has just always been considered the low end of harddrives. Generally not the quickest either. I think most of it comes from their lower price and a time when maxtors died constantly in new machines. When I first started building systems in the 90's, maxtor was the biggest joke and nobody(techy ppl) wanted their drive. They've supposedly come a long way since then, I don't know. Seagate owns them now. I've owned a few Seagates, and the only one to die on me was a first gen sata1 200gb. But the other seagates i've owned were all scsi drives.

I like WD, the only WD drive that failed on me was an old 1.2GB refurb and a new 8.4GB. But I was able to get WD to replace for free without hassle, and to me that counts for a lot.


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Alquerian
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 07:32
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I have had my rounds with different types of drives for years. First it was Maxtor, then it was Quantum, then it was Seagate. Seagate and Maxtor have really cleaned up their acts though. A credit to Seagate is that I have only encountered 1 bad SCSI drive of theirs, never had a single SCSI problem other than that.

Maxtor was total trash several years ago, they ran trash marathons with Quantum and often won. Their more recent drives are met with speculation because of this. Their performance and reliability has improved, I am sure of that.

I am personally a Western Digital fan. I have mixed feelings about Hitachi drives as I have had 2 of them go bad, however their price and performance was really nice.

Visit the Wip!
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Dazzag
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 08:52
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Yeah, over the years I've had a fair few drives and the only ones that failed were Maxtors. But lately everything has been fine and I currently have a couple of maxtors that have been working fine for a couple of years now. I know that our old IT services people used to avoid them years ago when building new PCs. They used to like WD drives most of all if I remember rightly.

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
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Grandma
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 09:49 Edited at: 2nd May 2007 09:50
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Once i had a bad experience with Seagate dying on me after 1 year (and so quickly that i couldn't even save my files), after that i switched to Western Digital, and as Agent Dink said, after 4 years they are still running.

My friend has only maxtor drives, he loves them and i can see why, they seem to run as good as my Western Digitals.

Comp : 1024mb Ram, 3.0ghz, GeforceFX 5800, 1,1TB storage
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bond1
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 10:16
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The only hard drives that have ever failed on me were Maxtors. Two of them failed within a month of each other.

Now I try and stick with Western Digital as much as possible.

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"Your mom goes to college."
My FPSC stuff at http://www.hyrumark.com
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dark coder
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 10:31
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Haha, I just looked at the model number of my old HHDs and they were Maxtors, my primary one just broke after a year or so(remember to backup )

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Vidiot
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 17:41
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It seems to go in cycles. For a while, one manufacturer will put out a load of excermentally inspired products. Next thing you know, somebody else will and then the first manufacturer's stuff becomes the new "standard". I do video editing and have gone thru a lot of drives. I have at least 8 dead drives on the shelf and probably another 5-6 that were just removed for being too small. Although not all one brand, More than half of the deads are IBM drives which I find funny because no one else here has complained about IBM.

My conclusion is: You usually get what you pay for. I need big drives and my work isnt terribly critical or time sensative so I tend to go for the biggest cheap drives. For that discount, I expect to get a stinker once in a while.

The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? "Tea for Two". Deep Thought was Dyslexic.
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Phaelax
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Posted: 2nd May 2007 21:11
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Old IBM drives were great and very quiet, but that was long ago in the 90's before Hitachi started making their drives. (at least I think it was hitachi) At that point, they quickly disappeared from market.


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Mr Makealotofsmoke
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Posted: 3rd May 2007 10:03 Edited at: 3rd May 2007 10:04
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i like in order:

1. Seagate
2. WD
3. Maxtor

and i dont like Maxtor because they seam unreliable and cheaper than the others so they seam to be cheaply made


Mods, its 500x100, so you cant tell me its bigger than 600x120
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Manic
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Location: Completely off my face...
Posted: 3rd May 2007 13:19
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my housemate just bought a 300GB maxtor external drive, put all his backed up uni work on it, along with loads of films, TV & music.... and then it failed within 4 days.

I don't have a sig, live with it.
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Mr Makealotofsmoke
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Posted: 3rd May 2007 13:21
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bummer


Mods, its 500x100, so you cant tell me its bigger than 600x120
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indi
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Posted: 3rd May 2007 14:28
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I dont usually like maxtor either but im giving them a go with a 750 gig external.
I can always use the box later with another drive down the track.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 3rd May 2007 19:28
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There's been concerns with stability of all harddrives which have such high capacity. The word is they just aren't as reliable and have a shorter life.


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David R
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Posted: 3rd May 2007 19:37
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I have never ever had an HD fail on me. Even my... what.. 11 year old, Quantum Fireball 4gb is still alive and kicking. My current IBM has been going fine for about 5 years now. My Western Digital portable has been fine for about 2 years now too (obviously it'll live a lot longer than that before dying, but yeah)

No issues with any HD's I've ever had, so I obviously hold no grudge against Maxtor at all


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zenassem
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Posted: 3rd May 2007 23:31
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I work as a Network System's Tech., so I've seen many a HD's go, from each mfr. I myself service about 300 systems (desktops, laptops, servers) from numerous mfrs and dates(HP/Compaq, Dell, GateWay, Aopen/Generics). Most of my experience has been with IDE drives from WD (Caviar), Maxtor (?), & Quantum (Fireball) for desktops.

I'd have to say that for a long time WD was hands-down better choice in performance, reliability, warranty, RMA procedure/support, Web download/Fact sheets (White Papers)/Controller Firmware/updates, and Diaganostic Tools (Data LifeGuard).

Maxtor has come a long way though, (I believe at one time their warranties were only 2 years compared with WD's 3 year). I had purchased a Maxtor a few years back because of an unbelievable sale, and I'd have to say I was happy with the drive, and never had problems. Plus they have improved their tools, drivers, & support.

To me Quantum (especially) and Maxtor drives were noisier than WD. Most of the Quantums honestly sounded like they were about to go right out of the box. A bit scary hearing that empty spray-paint-can sound. They did alright, but in the long run with a lot of re-ghosting (re-imaging) the drives, sometimes 4 times a year; Western Digitals seemed to have the best results and the least amount of returns. Now my observations could be unfair, because perhaps the WD models were of a higher grade than the other mfr's models we picked up. I can't be sure.

If I have the choice, I go WD. Especially for servers. Though I'll have to double check the RAID drives used in my HP/Compaq servers. Haven't had any problems with them.

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