is it me or are Maxtors total crap?

[General Schvantzkoph]

Are you saying that you've owned a statistically significant number of
Maxtors and have seen a large failure rate? Or are you saying that you've
read or heard that the rate is high? If the latter, you need to remember
that in cases like this you normally hear only one side of the story --
people who have had no failure and are happy aren't likely to be posting or
talking about the fact. But if someone has even one failure then watever
failed is instantly and frequently complained about. I personally have used
various Maxtors with no problems and my most recent build used a Maxtor
160gB SATA drive and it is quiet and cool. But I could honestly compain
about the 100% failure rate of Toshiba laptop drives that I've owned
(meaning that one drive failed after a few months and really pissed me off).

I've developed server systems and in the process done testing on
statisically significant numbers of drives where we subjected large
numbers of drives to months of continous accesses. The drives that fared
worse were Maxtor and IBM, Seagates did fine. In my personal experience,
which is admittedly a small sample size, I've had 3 Maxtor drives dead out
of the box or within days out of a total number of 6. I've also had IBM
drives die on me. My experience with Western Digital has been good, one
drive failed after a couple of years but the rest (once again the sample
size is only half a dozen so it's not statistically significant) haven't
given me any trouble.

 

[Geoffrey King]

Obviously the secret internal countdown timer was running a bit fast

It's not secret, its part of the SMART specs.

 

[Midnight Moocher]

Thanks John,

Think I will give them a try. I spend a lot of time with my computer which has a WD and Fujitsu. One, or both, are very noisy. I
even fitted special sound proof padding from dabs.com. Didn't make all that much of a difference though.

 

[Midnight Moocher]

There are different sizes, which ones should I get for the HDs?

 

[John Smith]

I went down the padding route and bought some expensive stuff from QuietPC
but all it seemed to do was make my PC hotter. When I build a PC these days
my number one concern is noise so I get the VGA cards with heatsinks, go for
the Samsung fluid baring drives, big slow case fans and that wonderful
Zalman CPU heatsink, etc, etc.

However, the biggest contribution can often be minor like those groumets. A
friend put me on to them and I replaced the ones that came with my Sonta
case and they made a remarkable difference even to a Samsung Spinpoint
drive. A friend actually just rests his HD on 8 of them in a drive bay. When
even small amounts of sound disappear you suddenly are aware of it going. I
think Dabs sell rubber feet for your case - haven't bought them myself yet -
but a friend swears by them.

You can do a quick experiment with a pile of newspaper - bung a few copies
of a newspaper under your case and listen to learn if the case resting on
the floor was causing vibration. If so,consider buying some rubber feet for
your case. Hang on - here are the case rubber feet -
http://www.dabs.com/uk/productView.htm?quicklinx=30WV

I have one WD drive but I have it powered off for 99% of the time - only
power it up for back-up purposes as, although very fast, they are just too
noisy.

If you continue to have problems hop on over to
http://www.silentpcreview.com/ and read the latest tips on getting a quiet
PC.

Hope this helps,


John.

Thanks John,

Think I will give them a try. I spend a lot of time with my computer which

has a WD and Fujitsu. One, or both, are very noisy. I

even fitted special sound proof padding from dabs.com. Didn't make all

that much of a difference though.

 

[half_pint]

I think any old rubber washer would be just as good and a mite
cheaer.

 

[half_pint]

Actually, in the UK anyway the retailers liability is not just limited to
the warrenty provided and the warrenty may well be worthless
but thats another matter.

Its reasonable to expect a drive to last longer than a year so get
some legal advise and push for a refund.

 

[half_pint]

Was it 'special' padding or just high priced sofa filling?

Thanks John,

Think I will give them a try. I spend a lot of time with my computer which

has a WD and Fujitsu. One, or both, are very noisy. I

even fitted special sound proof padding from dabs.com. Didn't make all

that much of a difference though.

 

[Lucas Tam]

- 50% failure rate for Seagate Medalist Pro 7200 RPM IDEs (ran HOT)

Yup, my Seagate literally blew up on me - smoke and all.

 

[Louise]

I went down the padding route and bought some expensive stuff from QuietPC
but all it seemed to do was make my PC hotter. When I build a PC these days
my number one concern is noise so I get the VGA cards with heatsinks, go for
the Samsung fluid baring drives, big slow case fans and that wonderful
Zalman CPU heatsink, etc, etc.

However, the biggest contribution can often be minor like those groumets. A
friend put me on to them and I replaced the ones that came with my Sonta
case and they made a remarkable difference even to a Samsung Spinpoint
drive. A friend actually just rests his HD on 8 of them in a drive bay. When
even small amounts of sound disappear you suddenly are aware of it going. I
think Dabs sell rubber feet for your case - haven't bought them myself yet -
but a friend swears by them.

You can do a quick experiment with a pile of newspaper - bung a few copies
of a newspaper under your case and listen to learn if the case resting on
the floor was causing vibration. If so,consider buying some rubber feet for
your case. Hang on - here are the case rubber feet -
http://www.dabs.com/uk/productView.htm?quicklinx=30WV

I have one WD drive but I have it powered off for 99% of the time - only
power it up for back-up purposes as, although very fast, they are just too
noisy.

If you continue to have problems hop on over to
http://www.silentpcreview.com/ and read the latest tips on getting a quiet
PC.

Hope this helps,


John.


has a WD and Fujitsu. One, or both, are very noisy. I
that much of a difference though.
be

I recently bought a Sonata and my Seagate drive is resting on the rubber
gromments that come with it.

What kind do you use and are they a lot better?

BTW, I'm in the US and the dabs site is in the UK.....

Louise

 

[Don Parker]

I had a Maxtor 225 MB drive from about 10 years ago that was working fine
until I decided to take the top cover off of it, and run it that way
(sitting in the bottom of the case with the case side cover removed) for a
while just to see what happened. It actually kept working until I changed
around my computer room and tossed it.

 

[Toshi1873]

I think any old rubber washer would be just as good and a mite
cheaer.

Best size is 5/32" internal diameter rubber
washers/grommets with 3/8" external diameter. (The
3/16" internal diameter is a bit loose.) The local
hardware store sells them 2/$0.62 - dunno where you can
bulk-order them. Some folks cut up sections of rubber
hose with an internal diameter of 5/32".

If you need longer screws, look at 6-32 machine screws,
1/4" to 3/8" long.

 

[Paul Hopwood]

Haven't seen one go longer than 18 months roughly. They are noisy too.

What is the operating temp range for a hard drive? Is 26-32 C within spec?

Had my first Maxtor failure in three years yesterday despite about 75%
of the drives I've brought in the last five or six years being Maxtor.

Filled in the Advanced Replacement form yesterday and they shipped the
replacement drive today so the warranty is damned good too!

--

 

[Stuffed]

I've developed server systems and in the process done testing on
statisically significant numbers of drives where we subjected large
numbers of drives to months of continous accesses. The drives that fared
worse were Maxtor and IBM, Seagates did fine. In my personal experience,
which is admittedly a small sample size, I've had 3 Maxtor drives dead out
of the box or within days out of a total number of 6. I've also had IBM
drives die on me. My experience with Western Digital has been good, one
drive failed after a couple of years but the rest (once again the sample
size is only half a dozen so it's not statistically significant) haven't
given me any trouble.

I've played with s/h stuff and some new from time to time when sorting out
friend's PCs, and I've seen more failed Maxtors than anything else. Sample
size maybe ten at most, 2 utter failures, 1 very faulty, a couple more just
on their way out due to age (I still have a couple of 80M drives I like to
play with!).
Seen very few faulty Seagates, but then, I've not seen many in total. Got a
4.3 Fujitsu that is still running strong even after developing bad sectors
after being Parcel Forced across the country to me, badly. It's in a
friend's box right now, while she waits for her Maxtor 40G to be replaced...
Same friend had an 80G IBM drive pack in after a couple of months, but the
replacement IBM is still working now, near the end of the warranty period.
Fingers crossed it stays that way.

My current drive is a s/h Western Digital 40G 7,200rpm. It's fairly quiet
when just spinning, and makes what I like to think of as a healthy
"clunking" when reading/ writing. It's still alot quieter than my now spare
Fujitsu 6.4 though, although that drive once again still runs glitch free
24/7 if I want it to.

I've not had much experience of larger modern drives other than the ones
mentioned, but my small collection of small drives like 80M, 270M etc seem
to work perfectly whenever I take them out the cupboard. Even got one of
those awful Seagate 1.2 (or 1.7, can't remember) drives that still works,
might be a record?

 

[Midnight Moocher]

These are the people I got the Padding from but I wouldn't recommend them.
http://www.acoustiproducts.com/en/index.asp.

 

[Dorothy Bradbury]

For noise, treat the cause not the effect.

Treating cause is much more effective than the latter:
o Soundproofing only works where it is between noise-source & ears
o Case-Soundproofing - Case-Fans - Ears = doesn't work well

If data is important, use two drives for data of different makes & use a simple
xcopy script in task scheduler if need be to duplicate data between the drives.

The seagate U/Medallist were a high-return-rate drive & very unpopular,
there are of course the Fujitsu/Deskstar which were even less popular.

Seagate Barracuda have a good record, but frankly I prefer "2 brands".
The failures on some drives can be down to a chipset design / production
flaw, and so both unknown until found & then very similar at failure age.

Fluid bearings for drives is really a must these days, since ball-bearings
are both noisier and will wear starting from day one going noisier & more
play in terms of servo track following - a technical complaint v likely failure.
Some may remember the early ball-bearing barracuda drives, wow they
were fun when you have a dozen going thro V2 take-off or bust.

10,000rpm drives tend to be quiet - however remember bearing is just a part
of the story, disk access noise can be *fun*. Like when a pile of Seagate
Cheetah 10,000rpm start thrashing it's like frozen peas on aluminium pans.

If speed doesn't matter so much, or you want rugged/quiet then you may
want to consider the new breed of 2.5" disks - 5400rpm & 7200rpm exist.
The Hitatchi 7200rpm drives come in 2 flavours, "laptop" & continuous-on
which is perhaps more for data-centre/blade deployment re I/O thrashing/hrs.

With HD becoming used for near-tape-replacing d2d near-line-storage then
multiple brands is distinctly preferable - easy to use a 2.5" USB as backup.

Temperature does matter for hard-drives - cooler IS better, both re motor
drive ic's and the actual media inside having a finite temperature - a lot of
semiconductor stuff can run hot, but magnetic media is still just that re risk.
More of an issue when you have a lot of high-rpm disks: just direct cooling.

Maxtor do list a new line of "near line storage" drives for archiving, which
recommend for low I/O and in the same spec say proven in network attached
storage, NAS. To me that seems like a contradiction re archiving v heavy-use
since a NAS tends to be pooled storage and so more requests from such.

Laptop drives seem to be a good compromise for an archive use, yet fast.

 

[Midnight Moocher]

I went down the padding route and bought some expensive stuff from QuietPC

but all it seemed to do was make my PC hotter.

Me too.

When I build a PC these days
my number one concern is noise so I get the VGA cards with heatsinks, go for
the Samsung fluid baring drives, big slow case fans and that wonderful
Zalman CPU heatsink, etc, etc.

When I built my PC, sound levels where a distant thought. Now however, it's the only thing that let's my PC down. I am tempted to
buy some good quality ear-plugs rather risk paying out too much on the other bits and pieces.
http://www.elvex.com/reusable-ear-plugs.htm

However, the biggest contribution can often be minor like those groumets. A
friend put me on to them and I replaced the ones that came with my Sonta
case and they made a remarkable difference even to a Samsung Spinpoint
drive.

I had a look at overclockers, (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Fan_Grills_and_Fan_Accessories_34.html)
but I'm a little confussed by what item you are refering to. Is it the 'Acoustifan Anti-Vibration Gel Mounts' or the 'Vantec
Vibration Dampening Kit'?

A friend actually just rests his HD on 8 of them in a drive bay. When
even small amounts of sound disappear you suddenly are aware of it going. I
think Dabs sell rubber feet for your case - haven't bought them myself yet -
but a friend swears by them.
You can do a quick experiment with a pile of newspaper - bung a few copies
of a newspaper under your case and listen to learn if the case resting on
the floor was causing vibration. If so,consider buying some rubber feet for
your case. Hang on - here are the case rubber feet -
http://www.dabs.com/uk/productView.htm?quicklinx=30WV

I'll give this a try, thanks.

I have one WD drive but I have it powered off for 99% of the time - only
power it up for back-up purposes as, although very fast, they are just too
noisy.

I can't afford to keep one off. I use both during sessions.

If you continue to have problems hop on over to
http://www.silentpcreview.com/ and read the latest tips on getting a quiet
PC.

Hope this helps,

John.

Will Do!!
Thanks.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

[half_pint]

Me either, sounds like a load of marketing hype and waffle.
I am sure stuff ng your machine with old news papers would
be just as effective if not more so. Probably easier to do too.

Incidently I have a go doing that on mine, and it won't
cost a penny.

I would not waste money with people I consider to be
con artists.

 

[DaveW]

Yes, Maxtor's have a high failure rate. I've always been very pleased with
the Western Digital's I've had over the years, for years.

 

[John Smith]

I recently bought a Sonata and my Seagate drive is resting on the rubber
gromments that come with it.

What kind do you use and are they a lot better?

BTW, I'm in the US and the dabs site is in the UK.....

Louise

Louse,

I replaced the black rubber gromets on the drive bays in my Sonata with the
ones that I mentioned are sold at Overclockers.co.uk and, boy, did it make a
big difference. I see Silenx sell them in the US.

This is the US supplier of the 'quiet feet'

http://www.quietpcusa.com/acb/showprod.cfm?&DID=8&CATID=6&ObjectGroup_ID=18

You can also look at gromets over at:

http://www.silenx.com

John.