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Gaybucks · 09-24-2006, 04:04 AM

My experience is that ALL drive manufacturers have had runs of abysmally bad drives. We use a lot of externals for storage of video files, and in the last two years, we've had a roughly equal number of failures of Western Digital and Maxtor drives. Years ago, IBMs were awful, and before that, Seagates sucked.

I've noticed a couple of things:

1. Maxtors seem MUCH more prone to heat failures. They will not tolerate high temperatures (such as you find in one of those portable cases) nearly as well as Seagates will.

2. I've had more "click of death" failures from Western Digitals than Maxtors, but have heard it in both. If you get the "click of death" and IMMEDIATELY turn the drive off as soon as you hear it, and -- I'm not kidding -- pull the drive out, wrap it in several plastic bags such as Ziplocs, and put it in the freezer for about 8 hours, you can *usually* get it to run long enough to get all of your data back. Not sure exactly why the freezing works, but it's saved my ass on unreadable click-of-death drives about a half dozen times.

3. There is a little known but documented bug in all versions of Windows that external USB or Firewire drives can become corrupt if large files (for example, an AVI of a 10 minute scene) are written to external drives, particularly when anything else is also being written to the same drive. It can cause the file allocation table to get totally corrupted or, worse, damaged so badly that the computer thinks the drive is not formatted. This happens both with FAT32 (Windows 98) and NTFS (2000 and XP). The data can be salvaged using a recovery tool such as Get Data Back, but it's a pain in the ass. So be wary when using an external drive for large files.

4. Seagates made within the last 5 years seem MUCH more reliable than any other drive I've used thus far. And they come with a 5 year warranty, so even Seagate must think they'll keep working. Maxtors, by contrast, came with a year warranty until very recently.

09-24-2006, 04:04 AM
Gaybucks Confirmed User Join Date: May 2004 Location: Sacramento, CA Posts: 451	My experience is that ALL drive manufacturers have had runs of abysmally bad drives. We use a lot of externals for storage of video files, and in the last two years, we've had a roughly equal number of failures of Western Digital and Maxtor drives. Years ago, IBMs were awful, and before that, Seagates sucked. I've noticed a couple of things: 1. Maxtors seem MUCH more prone to heat failures. They will not tolerate high temperatures (such as you find in one of those portable cases) nearly as well as Seagates will. 2. I've had more "click of death" failures from Western Digitals than Maxtors, but have heard it in both. If you get the "click of death" and IMMEDIATELY turn the drive off as soon as you hear it, and -- I'm not kidding -- pull the drive out, wrap it in several plastic bags such as Ziplocs, and put it in the freezer for about 8 hours, you can usually get it to run long enough to get all of your data back. Not sure exactly why the freezing works, but it's saved my ass on unreadable click-of-death drives about a half dozen times. 3. There is a little known but documented bug in all versions of Windows that external USB or Firewire drives can become corrupt if large files (for example, an AVI of a 10 minute scene) are written to external drives, particularly when anything else is also being written to the same drive. It can cause the file allocation table to get totally corrupted or, worse, damaged so badly that the computer thinks the drive is not formatted. This happens both with FAT32 (Windows 98) and NTFS (2000 and XP). The data can be salvaged using a recovery tool such as Get Data Back, but it's a pain in the ass. So be wary when using an external drive for large files. 4. Seagates made within the last 5 years seem MUCH more reliable than any other drive I've used thus far. And they come with a 5 year warranty, so even Seagate must think they'll keep working. Maxtors, by contrast, came with a year warranty until very recently. __________________ Gaybucks.com 100% exclusive American guys - hosted movie galleries - NATS - Boyfunk.com - Boysfeetclub.com - AJsCloset.com- SkylerDeVoss.com ICQ 272-995-402