If your going to buy a new hard drive
 

I can't stress how important it is to stay away from Maxtor's. I worked for a Fortune 500 company for the last 6 years as a Network Admin/User Support. The amount of times we had to replace bad Maxtor hard drives was unimaginable. Supported about 500 end-users and a ton of servers and mainframes....

Put your trust and money with Seagate...:2 cents:

Buying a Maxtor is simply the worst decision you could make for your data. Half of the Maxtor hard drives I have owned have failed! I recommend Hitachi as the hard drive of choice for sensitive and important data followed closely by Seagate.

Of course, being that they're the lowest bid, and in every commodity PC doesn't do anything to skew these numbers..

what about hi-density 1.44 floppies? what would you suggest?

Pretty the only brand I buy is seagate.

ive always been a big fan of seagate :)

I had some of these long time ago...

http://www.ibmdeskstar75gxplitigation.com/

The IBM DeathStar clicking sound will haunt me forever.:party-smi

Aye, the old IBM drives before Hitachi took over their HD dev. sucked total ass, the IBM deskstars were just about the only drives that could compete with maxtor in terms of pure shittiness. After Hitachi took over though, the drives are completely awesome. I've yet to have one fail, been using them since 2k3.

I haven't had any problems with my Maxtors.been running fine for almost 5 years.The older were the better ones

Yeah they aren't all bad, I have about 5 maxtors with no problems with a few of them that are old as yours. I also have 2 more maxtors that are starting to get more and more bad sectors. Glad I'm using HD Tune otherwise I might still have data I want on the 2 drives going bad.

we've had our problems with the IBM drives also...

your lucky then...have those been your Primary Hard drives or do you just use those to store and backup data???

I know you were talking to the other guy but I've used the hell out of the 5 good ones I have and few of them are old(around 4-5yrs). Not all of them are shit, if they were Maxtor wouldn't have made it as long as they did.

Both primary which is backed up..I think most drives the quality goes down with increased space.The smaller the better..just more of them

Btw Seagate owns Maxtor now so the quality of Maxtor drives may change...

i agree...large drives tend to have more problems...

I have a Deskstar 60Gb from October 2001. It never did the click of death, but one day a huge number of sectors (like 30-40%) suddenly went bad. Through some research it appears that it's a firmware bug that energises the write head WHILE IT IS MOVING ACROSS THE PLATTER. :warning

All data was lost because every track had multiple sectors corrupted.

The real kick in the teeth is that after using an IBM low level format utility it works just fine. I doubt I'll ever use it again because I don't know when/if it's going to spray whiteout over my data. For now it's sitting in plastic a HD carrier doing nothing...

your one of the lucky ones then, but statistics don't lie....supporting almost ~1,000 computers for 6 years and having Maxtors go bad, for one reason or another - makes me stay away from Maxtors...

there was a big difference between the amount of Maxtors that went bad and Seagates that went bad....something not noticable to the general user and only in large production environments....

another company that i recommend is Dell.....i only own Dell in my home now

Dell computers had the least problems out of Toshibas, Compaqs, and Dell

Seagate.. not only are they reliable they're also quiet

Man... I had the SAME thing happen with the Deskstar 60GB! I managed to recover all my data though by using a program called HDD Regenerator (took about 24 hours for it to finish, but it brought back all the sectors except for about a dozen). All the other deskstar drives I had were utter crap as well, but the 60gb dtla-307060 seemed to be the worst. I don't store anything critical on it anymore but I do keep all my MAME games on there, no harm if that stuff gets deleted.

seagate barracuda only :thumbsup

Hmm, just thinking, the only thing I'd trust the DeathStar with these days would be expendable data, such as swap and temp files. Not sure if it's worth installing since it's IDE (ATA100 or ATA133 I guess?)...

BTW does that HDD regenerator thingy work on SATA drives?

Im using Seagate HD for 5 years and still it didnt fail me :)

Seagate is owning the maxtor brand for quite some time already.....

seagate only, but then Maxtor is a Seagate brand....

Yeah, HDD regenerator works on any IDE/SATA drive, only thing it wont? work on (I think) is on drives in a Raid-config but I may be wrong about that as well.

It's a self contained app, right? Wouldn't it need its own driver for the SATA controller, or does the controller provide for neanderthal BIOS calls as well? 'Doze doesn't wanna know about my SATA drives until a specific manufacturer driver is installed. :)

It runs off of either a floppy or cd image, not exactly sure how it works (since it does work with sata I'd assume the later). I've used HDD regenerator about a dozen times on various different 'damaged' drives and it's managed to bring back a good many of them at least long enough for me to pull the data off, both SATA and IDE drives. It's slow, at least a full day on a 60gig drive.

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.

All drivers which i had has been fucked.People calling me hard drive killer hehe.
I destroyed ibm,maxtor,seagete,conner, and now i have hitachi,samsung,one maxtor again and one seagate baracuda again

Have you managed to kill an Hitachi yet? I haven?t thus far, and I've killed my fair share of drives as well. ATM they seem to be the best drives on the market followed fairly close by seagate.

I love the Hitachi drives, they are in all my large storage units and have never had a single issue with them, they just keep running and running and running.

But for servers, nothing beats the WD RE drives. These things are rated for 1 million hours and high amounts of reads and writes and i have yet to have a RE drive fail on me ( and i have 50-60 of them) If your data is important to you you will spend the extra and buy the better drives. If not, then a maxtor drive will do.

Note .... the fancy Porsche designed Lacie cases contain Maxtor drives ... if you really want to live dangerously the Lacie "Big" drives contain multiple Maxtor drives ..... :2 cents:

I own a maxtor drive and it's running ok.I've had it for 3 years already.

There all low grade, still the next billionaire will be the company that finds out how to make a solid hard drive low priced.