Having bad luck with maxtor drives

Just curious if other people have had trouble with maxtor dives. I have had 3 drives fail from them, all right after their lousy 1 year warranty. These were all builds for freinds or family and budget was a big consideration, but I think now that they are not worth using at any price. Would like to know others experience with these, good or bad. Thanks.

The overall quality of Maxtor drives is right on par with all of the other manufacturers - i.e. they all make drives that will fail at some point. What kind of drive are they, and how did they fail? It's possible that you've just had some bad luck. Also possible that wherever you bought them from did not ship them in proper packaging and they were damaged in transit (happens more than you'd think...)

I had terrible luck with maxtor back in the day so I haven't used them in a long time. They may have gotten better but I wouldn't know. I think their warranty is pathetic compared to that of their competitors, though, which doesn't speak well of how confident they are in their drives' failure rates.

All the drives I've ever had die have been from a bad set of drives (DeathStar) or cooling or power problems. I'm running 3 Maxline III 300GB drives with no problems whatsoever, and plan to buy two more. If you take care of them, they'll take care of you

Maxline 3's carry a 5 year warranty, and the Diamondmax 10s carry 3 year warranties. Where have you seen less?

I do hear of problems with Maxtors, so I won't say that there aren't any problems (but then again I've heard of problems with every device before)

I've been running Maxtors for years - Now that I think about it, 90% of the drives that I've purchased since my 20GB back in 2000 have been maxtors (one of four in my box right now) and none have failed on me (they're all still running in a computer in some shape or form - 20+40 in server next to me, dual 40's in the server back home, 40+80 in my dad's box, 100 in brother's box, 120 in another brother's box, 300 in mine).

The only Maxtor that ever failed on me was a 4.3GB drive about three years ago. Then again, its the only drive that's ever failed on me.

Now only if its guts were as cool looking as the 4GB WD drive that I opened....

I had 27gig maxtors die on me... at one time I had 3, and all of 'em died within two years. That pretty much soured my experience with them... so I've been getting WD and Seagate since, and all of 'em are still going strong, even the 20gig WDs I've had for probably 5+ years.

I've had bad luck with Maxtors, and use only WD and Seagate for personal use. Practically speaking, it's usually nothing but random chance on what brand does great and what craps out on you, but nonetheless experiences influence purchases.

I have a 4 year old Maxtor 120 that is still running fine in my backup computer, and I have a 300 GB Maxline III in my main comp. Running fine here.

I have hard drives from 4 different companies, and they've all been fine until now, but people say I am one of the luckiest consumers they've seen.

Many factors could lead to it - smacking it during installation, bad batch, improper shipping, etc.

These were all the low budget variety. Two 20gigs and now just had a 40 gig go bad. All ide. One just died completely, one was working but started make all kinds of noise. The 40 gig will be working fine, then the comp will restart, and not find the drive. I thought that maybe it was a heat issue, but it didn't even seem warm to the touch. After past trouble with these, I just replaced it with a seagate. Thanks for the replies

I had two maxtors die in two years, and the last WD I bought is totally whacked-out, so right now I'm only running Seagates, primarily because of the 5 year warrantee.

Out of all of my drives, the only one I've lost in the past five years (that wasn't caused by a power problem) was a WD1200BB, and WD replaced it under the warranty.

And people wonder why I shell out big bucks on power supplies, UPS systems, and fans.

Fortron FSP, Seasonic, Antec TruePower, and Enermax PSUs here.

I have at least half a dozen drives each from Maxtor, WD, and Seagate. I've got quite a few Quantum SCSI drives, with Hitachi and Fujitsu also represented in my stable.

EDIT: *eclipsed 4TB yesterday*

did you purchase the drives from the same vendor? how much time between purchases? same models drives? PSU? you see what i am getting at?

the reason i ask is that you may have gotten a bad "batch". i cannot speak to the vendor you bought from, but when i worked RMA/Tech at a retail vendor, we used to get all kinds of characters coming in with components that "fell off the truck" or some other miracle story to explain why they were willing to sell (what appeared to be) new/unopened components. now i am not saying they were all stolen, but on more than one occasion I had to RMA some drives (purchase agent bought 20 from "some guy" cheap), we sold them and at least 15 came back dead. i replaced them with drives we had received from the manufacturer, despite having more of the mystery drives on the shelf.

the manufacturer (upon getting the SN's) wanted to know where we purchased the drives, as they were not supposed to be shipped. there was a flaw in the production run, and were not supposed to be shipped out of the factory. they did replace our drives, when it was determined they had shipped the drives to a distribution company-and blamed a warehouse worker (probably some guy/girl gettin 6-7 bux/hr because some one needed to be held accountable).

my point is when i build any system i keep the SN and Manufacturing dates on file. if i see a pattern of failures, i can look to production runs dates etc. and compare. i have had more WD fail than any others, but i have to keep in mind for many years i used only WD drives.

the reduction of warranty on HDD's is pretty lame, and you could not pay me to use IBM-now Hitachi. HDD's have moving parts, and incredible RPM and generate lots of heat...as with any device like this...they will fail. i was just curious because you said you had 3 die, and that strikes me as a little odd.

Hmm, I have a 3 year warrenty on my HDs. I have had fairly good experience with them. I will also say that their RMA service is amazing. I did an advance RMA and they shipped it out in two days via Fed Ex 2Day. They have great tech support too. I am about to RMA a very old drive that is giving me read errors. Great service overall.






PS. No, Maxtor didn't pay me to write this

There are three drive manufacturers that I don't buy from (if I have a choice):

1) IBM - the DeskStar fiasco included the more expensive ServerStar line, and they're not in the drive business anymore.
2) Samsung - The drives are cheap, but my data and time are not.
3) Hitachi - I'm assuming some of the management fools who created the Star problems are still around and haven't been fired/retired yet, so I won't buy consumer-level drives from them. Enterprise-class from Hitatchi is fine and worth it. (different division)

Maxtor, WD and Seagate are all cool and crap out at about the same rate, IMHO.

Huh.
IMHO I dread WDs'. I've replaced four drives this year for friends & co-workers dells. They were mostly 60GB/80GB and one 40GB drive. So, bout 2-5 years old. Seems like the going rate these days. What makes me scratch my noggin is the fact my IBM DeskStars, which everyone avoided like the plague, are still running perfectly fine in my machines(9GB to 26GB models). Ran with no dedicated cooling, RAID 0, stacked in adjacent bays 3-4 drives in each sys, went to LAN partys, etc.

IMHO, no basic low-level WD for me, Seagate is first pick. One thing I hear a lot about is the noise on Maxtors, otherwise, no prob. I'd be willing to gamble on a Hitachi and make an exception for WD Raptors

I started buying Maxtor about 15 months ago. Since then, I've lost:

* 2x Maxline II Plus 250GB SATA disks (another is spitting out errors but I will replace the SATA cable soon to verify): One drive was clicking when turned on (think deathstar) and the other had bad sectors on it.
* 1x DiamondMax 10 250GB SATA

I bought a Seagate 300 to replace one of the faulty drives as the replacement was taking a while - the Maxline II Plus drives are 251.0GB, the MaxLine III drives (replacements) are 250.0 and this thing is a RAID 5 array... so had to track down a II Plus. This is now sitting in its wrapper as a cold spare.

I have never lost a Seagate drive other than the one where the controller board failed due to a dodgy PATA firewire case. The drive was accessible with swapping the board around with another and the data was recovered (well, there wasn't anything of value on there anyway at the time).

PSU is an Antec 550 EPS12V.