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Maxtor... still suck?

Z

ZenDragon

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 22, 2000
Messages
1,698
I have had nothing but bad luck with maxtor in the past. I usually buy Western Digital, or seagate. But lately I have been having a lot of problems with my 5 year old 100gb western digital drive so I am looking for another drive. I dont need anything huge, but I have seen some good deals for some 200gb maxtors with 16 mb cache. Are these any good? Back in the day my work had over 40 maxtors fail within a few months of each other, so its kind of a sore thumb for me. But if you all think they have fixed their problems then I just might change my mind. What say you?
 
Those Maxtor drives that failed at work were probably slimline DM8s. The DM10s that you are talking about are much better drives. I have two of them myself, no problems :cool:

Maxtor rules when it comes to cheap capacity, be sure to keep them cool.
 
40 drives fail in a few months? I'm not doubting you, but that's very hard to believe. I've had about two dozen Maxtors over the last 10 years or so. I've had about 4 fail, but that was after about 18 months to two years,

I've bought 6 DiamondMax drives in the last two years, three just a month ago however, but the older three are still working in my rigs. Overall, I'd say they're pretty good. I've had drives from all the major manufactuers and they do eventually give up the ghost.

I've got 3x300GB DiamondMax 10 in the sig rig, so I hope they do hold up! Three of these puppies in RAID 0 really fly. Faster than two Raptors in RAID 0, with more capacity and cheaper tp booot. Maybe not as realiable but I only expect 2 years out of them, knock on wood.

They do get a little warm, but this Antec P180 case gives them a good amount of air flow with the Enermax PSU fan blowing on them.
 
The worst tech support experience I ever had was with a Maxtor tech. He was so ignorant that I smashed the drive with a hammer while I was on the phone with him. The only way he could have offended me anymore would be to start swearing at me. I talked to his supervisor and I hope he got fired. I swore at that moment Maxtor would never make a nickel off me.

I know that it is a isolated incident (or atleast I hope it was), but the other RMA's I have had with Seagate have been exemplary. I vote with my purchases. Also Forbes voted Seagate its company of the year. That doesnt happen by accident.
 
From experience only, Maxtor is pretty good in my mind, they just run a bit warm, Seagate has caught my attention as of late (running 6 of thier 300GB satas in raid 5 now ;) ), and WD is a solid name in my book. Price dif usually isnt all that much, always watch for years warranted, I know seagate has a nice 5 year warranty, quiet, and cool running drives... why I vouched for them with my new raid setup.
 
I've used a lot of drives from all the main manufacturers... I tend to have the worst luck with WD and the best with Seagate with the others somewhere inbetween.

Just my personal experience though.
 
heatlesssun said:
40 drives fail in a few months? I'm not doubting you, but that's very hard to believe. I've had about two dozen Maxtors over the last 10 years or so. I've had about 4 fail, but that was after about 18 months to two years,

I've bought 6 DiamondMax drives in the last two years, three just a month ago however, but the older three are still working in my rigs. Overall, I'd say they're pretty good. I've had drives from all the major manufactuers and they do eventually give up the ghost.

I've got 3x300GB DiamondMax 10 in the sig rig, so I hope they do hold up! Three of these puppies in RAID 0 really fly. Faster than two Raptors in RAID 0, with more capacity and cheaper tp booot. Maybe not as realiable but I only expect 2 years out of them, knock on wood.

They do get a little warm, but this Antec P180 case gives them a good amount of air flow with the Enermax PSU fan blowing on them.
Click to expand...


It's true... and I believe they were the half high (slimline) drives that Doug mentioned. we had approx 40 drives fail within about a 7 month period. We had to take one to the DPS computer forensic lab to have some data recovered. It was pretty annoying.

So you all say the DM10's are the decent ones? I was hoping to get something that would last at least a year, before to a total overhaul of my box. So maybe ill be alright with those :)
 
Every Western Digital drive that I've bought OEM has needed at least one RMA. Everyone else I talk to swears by them. Go figure.

Just keep your stuff backed up.
 
Just curious, how many drives did your company have installed at the time that they experienced 40 failures in one month?

My personal experience with Maxtors has been good. Like the other survivors their unit reliability seems to go in cycles, mostly very good but occassionaly poor. From all I've seen the dm10 units are excellent.
 
I have never owned one and will never buy a maxtor drive, if yours has been running 24/7 for the last 20yrs with no problem great, your lucky.

I have replaced 60 dead slim lines over the last 2 years before we forced HP to give us 80 more drives to proactively get all that model of maxtor drive out of our building. We were told it was a bad revision but this week I replaced 2 drives that were replacements for failed maxtor drives (these second ones were the "good" revision). I also have several friends at work whose full height 80 and 160 gig drives fail, plus a good friend had both of his full height drives fail within 6 months this year. My experience with them at work may have been due to a really shitty model they produced, but I still won't touch one.

Maxtor dead in last 2 years around 70, WD in last 2 years only 3, Seagate in last 2 years 0, toshiba laptop drives around 15 in 2 years (never buy toshiba).
 
out of our 20 new workstations, we had 5 of the maxtor drives fail within 3 days :p
 
broberts said:
Just curious, how many drives did your company have installed at the time that they experienced 40 failures in one month?

My personal experience with Maxtors has been good. Like the other survivors their unit reliability seems to go in cycles, mostly very good but occassionaly poor. From all I've seen the dm10 units are excellent.
Click to expand...


We had purchased about 90 brand new Optiplex GX150s over about a 4 month period. Over the next 7 months drives began to fail. I had heard a rumor from a Unisys tech that Dell had purchased a very large bad batch of maxtor drives and was in the process of RMAing over 120 thousand of them. Apparently we got some of those drives. Over the course of the 3 and a half years I was there, I replaced probably close to every single one of those drives, most of them were replaced before they failed when they started showing signs of problems. I didnt want to risk losing data so I bitched to Dell and they replaced them. The worst one I had to replace actually had the platter detach from the spindle. The platter was actually spinning free on the spindle.

We had several full height maxtor drives fail during this period as well, though somehow I think that had something to do with the fact that they pack those hard drives in such small cases, not giving them much room to ventilate.
 
Drives are drives. The only drive I would say had a legitimate problem where there actually was a large number of them go bad and your chances of it happening to you were higher than normal was the IBM Desktars from a few years ago.

People need to remember that consumer drives are not rated in their MTBF for constant use. So yeah, a 5yr old drive failing, well that's about right.
 
Im going to get a Western Digital 160 GB WD Caviar® RE SATA drive... I dont have an SATA controller on my mobo so Im just going to buy one of those cheapo raid silicon image pci cards till I upgrade my mobo. This drive has a 1 million hour MTBF and has a 5 year warranty. This drive is designed for RAID, ill only have one but ill buy another one next month and run it in a Mirrored array for protection. Not to bad for only
$102 dollars.
 
I don't know why all the Maxtor bashing all of a sudden? :confused: Back in the day when the top hard disks were 8GB in size, I remember it was considered a privilege to own a Maxtor hard disk...have they gone downhill so fast since then? To me, the storage device community is as divided as the GPU community when it comes to these things. People will tell you one brand is nothing but trouble, and pretty soon you'll find just as many people saying exactly the opposite. That just confuses the hell out of me... :eek:
 
CokeFiend said:
We had purchased about 90 brand new Optiplex GX150s over about a 4 month period. Over the next 7 months drives began to fail. I had heard a rumor from a Unisys tech that Dell had purchased a very large bad batch of maxtor drives and was in the process of RMAing over 120 thousand of them. Apparently we got some of those drives. Over the course of the 3 and a half years I was there, I replaced probably close to every single one of those drives, most of them were replaced before they failed when they started showing signs of problems. I didnt want to risk losing data so I bitched to Dell and they replaced them. The worst one I had to replace actually had the platter detach from the spindle. The platter was actually spinning free on the spindle.

We had several full height maxtor drives fail during this period as well, though somehow I think that had something to do with the fact that they pack those hard drives in such small cases, not giving them much room to ventilate.
Click to expand...
I worked as a technician for a school district a couple of years ago that had deployed a bunch of Dell PCs with Slimline DM8s, and we did the exact same thing. Does this effect my view of other Maxtor drives? Not a bit, I run 3 of them in my main rig. One line does not the whole brand make.
 
TheCreator said:
I've used a lot of drives from all the main manufacturers... I tend to have the worst luck with WD and the best with Seagate with the others somewhere inbetween.

Just my personal experience though.
Click to expand...

And I'm just the opposite,...I've put Seagate, WD, Maxtor, and the 'ole IBM deskstars in many a computer over the years and the only brand that I've had fail were the Maxtors...even the few IBM Deskstars outlasted some (Most) of the Maxtors I've used in machines...I'd prefer just not to take the chance with'em anymore...
 
Lol my ol Maxtor 80gb IDE has been kickin for 3 years now no problems.
 
NOthing but issue for maxtor with me

WD - only drives i buy now, and if i cant get a WD i get samsung. i have only had one WD drive die on my in 8 years.
 
This debate won't go on for much longer...once Seagate takes over Maxtor you will only see a debate between WD and Seagate...Toshiba and Hitachi stink so no one cares about them.
 
Well Hitachi 0wns the notebook market...and I doubt they stink, since they have one of the strongest anti-shock mechanisms available for their drives. :)
 
Don't forget that Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, and Toshiba are all backed by huge Asian conglomerates (Japanese in the case of Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Toshiba; Korean in the case of Samsung), so all of these companies have the resources to compete with Seagate. Western Digital has always been the maverick, doing what the bigger makers are unable or unwilling to do. However, WD is still far and away the least financially secure of the makers that are left. They are very much the Nintendo of the HDD business.

Maxtor bowing out is unfortunate, their SCSI drives are awesome and their desktop drives have delivered solid performance and unbeatable pricing recently. A shame indeed that their 500GB drive didn't quite make it out of the gate :(
 
DougLite said:
A shame indeed that their 500GB drive didn't quite make it out of the gate :(
Click to expand...

Serious tangent here but thought I would ask. When you sy the 500gb drives didn't make it out what do you mean? Are the 500gb one touch backups 2 drives in one enclosure?
 
Maxtor completed their 500GB design, but had problems getting into mass production of sufficient volume. It was for a lot of reasons - their first four platter drive in some time, extensive changes to the firmware and logic on the drives, quite a few new features, all while holding the line on reliability.

They're great drives, but they weren't able to meet the (huge) demand for them, particularly in the NAS/SAN/enterprise rackmount storage market.
 
DougLite said:
Maxtor completed their 500GB design, but had problems getting into mass production of sufficient volume. It was for a lot of reasons - their first four platter drive in some time, extensive changes to the firmware and logic on the drives, quite a few new features, all while holding the line on reliability.

They're great drives, but they weren't able to meet the (huge) demand for them, particularly in the NAS/SAN/enterprise rackmount storage market.
Click to expand...

Ok so does this drive
Which you can buy here
Contain the drive you are talking about?
 
Vertigo Acid said:
Judging by the form factor, it does not appear to contain two drives
Click to expand...

That is what I thought as well....which is why I don't understand Doug's comment that the 500gb was not released.....unless of course a) the drive is a fraud or b)they shoe horned two drives inside the enclosure.
 
I've had problems with DM8's in the past and of course the rebadged Quantums. Lately all I've used is WD's "JB" series until purchasing 200GB and 250GB Maxtor's a couple weeks ago. They're a little louder than my 80GB WD SE and run hotter but they bench slighty higher in most tests I've ran. I hope to get 2-3 years out of them.
 
Spectre said:
That is what I thought as well....which is why I don't understand Doug's comment that the 500gb was not released.....unless of course a) the drive is a fraud or b)they shoe horned two drives inside the enclosure.
Click to expand...
I never said it wasn't released. I said they weren't able to produce _enough_ of them.
 
DougLite said:
I never said it wasn't released. I said they weren't able to produce _enough_ of them.
Click to expand...

Ok. When you said :
DougLite said:
A shame indeed that their 500GB drive didn't quite make it out of the gate :(
Click to expand...
it sounded like they didn't make it out of the gate....ie weren't released.

I was getting worried since i have 20 on order that should be here this week.
 
The seocnd quote refers to the fact that Maxtor was banking o nthat one product to restore their financially solvency. Since they weren't able to meet demand, they didn't get enough revenue off of them to cover their costs and stay afloat :(
 
DougLite said:
The seocnd quote refers to the fact that Maxtor was banking o nthat one product to restore their financially solvency. Since they weren't able to meet demand, they didn't get enough revenue off of them to cover their costs and stay afloat :(
Click to expand...

Ok well...ok just not how it sounded intially :p

I assume though that Seagate will or whatever the new company is called will be honoring the warranties on the drives still?
 
Generally, when something like this goes down, the company doing the buy out assumes the liabilities as well as the assets. I know for a fact that Hitachi supports IBM drives manufactured before the HGST joint venture, accordign to IBM's original warranty terms.

Keep in mind that one of Seagate's goals is to assimilate Maxtor's customer base, upholding Maxtor's warranties is a good way to start :p
 
i've had alot of maxtors die

Personally. over 16 for myself

over 50 for office

I'm threw with maxtor

Hell my ps2 has a maxtor thats dying. my tivo has a maxtor thats dying
 
CokeFiend said:
I have had nothing but bad luck with maxtor in the past. I usually buy Western Digital, or seagate. But lately I have been having a lot of problems with my 5 year old 100gb western digital drive so I am looking for another drive. I dont need anything huge, but I have seen some good deals for some 200gb maxtors with 16 mb cache. Are these any good? Back in the day my work had over 40 maxtors fail within a few months of each other, so its kind of a sore thumb for me. But if you all think they have fixed their problems then I just might change my mind. What say you?
Click to expand...
I got a refurb DM10 from a forum member, it was DOA. Waiting for the RMA for the RMA.. .bleh

Ruffy said:
I'm threw with maxtor
Click to expand...

If that happend to me, i'd be through with them too.
 
drizzt81 said:
I got a refurb DM10 from a forum member, it was DOA. Waiting for the RMA for the RMA.. .bleh



If that happend to me, i'd be through with them too.
Click to expand...

well funny, I threw a maxtor drive across the lawn last week
 
I've only experienced Maxtor once, and it was pretty bad, but I guess that'll be the last time I'll have that experience. The 1st drive was slowly failing on me, and I managed to save my data on an older WD drive before it was rendered useless. RMA'ed it and got a refurbed one that eventually died by intermittent hard drive failure aka "clicks of death". I lost some irreplaceable stuff (I didnt realize it), but most of it was intact in the slightly outdated WD drive that still had my stuff in it. About a year later, I read up on the freezer trick here in this forum, and decided to give it a shot. Since it was basically rendered into a block of garbage for a year now, there was nothing to lose. The end result was success. I salvaged everything that was lost between the back-up of my old hard drive, and the failure of the Maxtor drive.

Well, that's my experience. I guess I'll throw it in with the pile of "thumbs-down" like a lot of us had.
 
Ruffy said:
i've had alot of maxtors die

Personally. over 16 for myself

over 50 for office

I'm threw with maxtor

Hell my ps2 has a maxtor thats dying. my tivo has a maxtor thats dying
Click to expand...

I have a Maxtor in my PS2 too, funny thing is it works pretty well there, but is very detrimental to performance when running it in a PC.

Fujitsu is great in the SCSI/notebook arena, but I don't see them competing that well against WD and Seagate in the desktop market. Samsung/Toshiba are also mostly notebook drive makers too aren't they? Unless Hitatchi makes a huge comeback with the Deskstars, I see the desktop market being pretty much a two-horse race with a few minor players.
 
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