Maxtor | Recommend | NOT

[canetoad]

A week before Xmas I bought 2 500gb Maxtor One Touch drives ($149 each) - one for my own extra storage, the other for my old Aunty's increasing collection of movies and NCIS. Mine died this morning.

I would have preferred a couple of the LaCie plain black box drives. I've had one for a while, and it is magnificent, but there didn't seem to be many on the shelves in the pre-xmas rush.

Googling found that dead One Touches was pretty common, but FFS, a three week old drive? I also found that Maxtor tech support seems to be non existent and didn't feel like returning the drive to the shop because I had a lot of data on it.

Anyhow, I pulled the drive out, put it in my computer and guess what. Nothing wrong with the hard drive itself (which is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11). It was the crappy Maxtor enclosure. In a way I'm glad it is dead - the flashing kleig light on the front gave me seizures. At the weekend I'll do the same for Aunty Mary's to forestall the heart attack she will have if she can't have her daily dose of Gibbs.

Maxtor, never again.

[Duer 157099]

1. Agreed

The only drives I've *ever* had fail (and I'm not one to ever get rid of equipment, I use it till it absolutely expires) were Maxtors.

I have one of the One Touch drives - had it for awhile now - and so far it hasn't died (but, I only use it for backup storage). When I got it (what was I thinking? I don't recall) I researched how to remove the drive from the enclosure and I seem to remember finding that it was not removable (perhaps they have changed that?)

Now my primary choice is always Seagate, followed by WD. I got a 500gig Seagate (internal, but enclosures are cheap enough if needed) last month from New Egg for about $60 total.

[canetoad]

3. LOL, the drives are still not removable

but a sharp tool fixes that!

[Jazzgirl]

9. Me too dotcosm.

Seagate first then WD. I have really good luck with them. I've got a great 300 gig Seagate external drive that I backup all my pictures and iTunes stuff to. I have a 1 terrabyte WD drive that I back up the system to. Both have all my downloaded programs stored on them for redundancy. :-)

[RoyGBiv]

2. Another vote against ...

I've had horrible experience with Maxtors. I've never purchased one on purpose, but I went through a string of computers I fixed that had had hard drive failures of some sort, and they all had Maxtors. I also had one in a pre-built system I had many long moons ago, and it crapped out on me very quickly.

I've had both Seagates and WD die unexpectedly too, but it was usually *very* quickly, indicating a bad lot, not necessarily a problem with the whole line. My current system is half-and-half I think. I forget. There are too many in there now to keep track. I need just to buckle down and get a couple of 1TB drives to reduce some of the heat.

[canetoad]

5. Come to think of it

The last failed hd I had was a maxtor too. What do you think are the most reliable at the moment? Should I put my trust in the Seagate that came out of the Maxtor enclosure?

[RoyGBiv]

6. As I told my daughter ...

If you want to be rich, find out what I'm betting on, and bet against.

After posting last, I counted. I have five separate drives in my system. Three are Seagate, two WD. The drive with /root and /home is a Seagate 250GB that I purchased 5 years ago. Never had a glitch, and as the /root /home drive, it gets more heavy use than any of the others. (I am now going to backup the entire thing because I'm sure I jinxed it.)

The WD drives win on speed, though. The two WD drives I have are now my workhorse data drives, a designation they were given after I ran a bunch of benchmarking tests on them to figure out which drives were fastest. All the drives have the same size cache and similar other specs.

I also have a Samsung drive I use as a swap-out data drive. I've had it for three years, I think, and it's never had a problem.

Basically, I'm a Seagate person. When I build a system for someone, it usually has either a Seagate or a Samsung, the later generally to keep the price as low as possible even though there's just not that great a difference these days.

[hobbit709]

4. The most drive failures I've had

were Hitachi, then Western Digital. Seagate and Maxtor are one company selling them under two different names. I've never had any problems getting any of them RMA'd and replaced. I've got some Maxtors that are pushing 10 years and still running. I've had WD drives that would give me two conflicting messages when running WD drive test 1. This is not a WD drive or 2. This drive is good-but it won't boot or read.
These were all internal drives, maybe the externals have bad interfaces or something.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

7. I install only Samsungs.

Most reliable drive I have seen. Not one has failed. Not one. Ever.

[Jazzgirl]

8. The drives I had fail were a particular IBM drive.

I can't remember the model now but I had no luck with them. I seem to have pretty good luck with Seagate and WD drives. Haven't tried Samsung but I love their products and wouldn't hesitate to try a drive.

[Jazzgirl]

10. Wow...That is weird.

I purchased a Western Digital 1 terrabyte external drive for $149 just before X-mas. The Maxtors seem quite expensive.

[canetoad]

11. In Australia Jazzgirl

I think we generally pay higher prices than US. $149 was pretty par for the course for 500gig.