Maxtor hard drives fail too soon.

[John Corliss]

Most people depend greatly on their hard drive(s) to be (a) reliable and
safe media for storing those files. Well, if you have a Maxtor hard
drive and tend to not back up your stuff, you might want to think about
doing so on either CD, DVD or on a backup hard drive made by another
manufacturer. Here is why:

I'd grown very concerned when Bill O'Brien (of Computer Shopper's "Hard
Edge" fame) at:

http://www.realtechnews.com/

had spoken out against Maxtor, citing the multiple failures he'd
experienced with drives from that manufacturer. Not only that, but
readers of Bill's blog have flooded him with tales of similar woe.

Seems that my concern was very warranted since after less than two years
of usage, my Maxtor Diamondmax Plus ATA 100/60 GB hard drive has totally
failed. Initially the drive started making a clacking noise at startup
and when accessing data. Then the hard drive light remained on, the
master file table got corrupted and finally the drive crapped out
entirely - dead as a doornail.

Luckily I lost no data since, besides backing up to CDR, I always run
two hard drives and use the slave as a backup clone of the master. I'd
just updated the clone too. The bad news is that the hard drive I'm
totally relying on at this point is an IBM Deskstar ATA/100 60 GB, which
it seems from a lot that I've read, is similarly unreliable. Not only
that, but it's at the end of the apparent lifespan attributed to it by
several of the negative reviews it's received.

During a phone conversation with my computer company's head of technical
support (both company and person will remain unnamed), he told me his
observations had led to the conclusion that Maxtor hard drives are
*very* unreliable and that Seagate drives are the way to go. He also
warned me that his experience has shown that the IBM Deskstar which came
with my computer will be about as reliable as my Maxtor turned out to be.

Note that I don't hold my computer company responsible for this problem
since hard drive life spans only become apparent after several years
have passed since a particular model's introduction. Not only that, but
the person referred to above was right out front about all this.

And yeah, I could send the Maxtor back to the company and get a "free"
replacement but because the drive still holds personal data that can be
recovered, that's not going to happen. It's probably a safe assumption
that Maxtor is very aware such concerns by its customers and depends on
this to alleviate their responsibility.

Not only that, but the three year warranty that I obtained with the
drive no longer exists on their new drives which only come with a meager
one year warranty. So basically, what Maxtor seems to be saying is that
you should expect your hard drive to fail after only a year of use and
that you should be expected to replace it at least that often. What
total bullshit and Maxtor will go the way of the dodo, I'm sure.

I have a Seagate on order and am hoping that the IBM "Deathstar" will
hold out until it arrives. In the mean time though, I'm religiously
backing up to CD.

Hey, believe what you want though.... it's your data. Still, you've been
warned.

 

[Papa]

Of course any hard drive can fail, but I have had outstanding service from
my Western Digital HDs over the last 10 years. Not a single failure on at
least 6 PCs.

 

[Noozer]

A friend of mine is running eight 250meg Maxtor drives in a RAID5 array...
He's had two drives fail in four months.

I'd be avoiding Maxtor these days.

 

[Bob Alexander]

Gee, my 4 year old Maxtor(16GB)is still running and during the same
time I have replaced 2 Western Digital(10GB)drives.

-----Original Message-----
From: John Corliss [mailto:[email protected]]
Posted At: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 8:59 AM
Posted To: alt.comp.hardware
Conversation: Maxtor hard drives fail too soon.
Subject: Maxtor hard drives fail too soon.


Most people depend greatly on their hard drive(s) to be (a) reliable and
safe media for storing those files. Well, if you have a Maxtor hard
drive and tend to not back up your stuff, you might want to think about
doing so on either CD, DVD or on a backup hard drive made by another
manufacturer. Here is why:

I'd grown very concerned when Bill O'Brien (of Computer Shopper's "Hard
Edge" fame) at:

http://www.realtechnews.com/

had spoken out against Maxtor, citing the multiple failures he'd
experienced with drives from that manufacturer. Not only that, but
readers of Bill's blog have flooded him with tales of similar woe.

Seems that my concern was very warranted since after less than two years
of usage, my Maxtor Diamondmax Plus ATA 100/60 GB hard drive has totally
failed. Initially the drive started making a clacking noise at startup
and when accessing data. Then the hard drive light remained on, the
master file table got corrupted and finally the drive crapped out
entirely - dead as a doornail.

Luckily I lost no data since, besides backing up to CDR, I always run
two hard drives and use the slave as a backup clone of the master. I'd
just updated the clone too. The bad news is that the hard drive I'm
totally relying on at this point is an IBM Deskstar ATA/100 60 GB, which
it seems from a lot that I've read, is similarly unreliable. Not only
that, but it's at the end of the apparent lifespan attributed to it by
several of the negative reviews it's received.

During a phone conversation with my computer company's head of technical
support (both company and person will remain unnamed), he told me his
observations had led to the conclusion that Maxtor hard drives are
*very* unreliable and that Seagate drives are the way to go. He also
warned me that his experience has shown that the IBM Deskstar which came
with my computer will be about as reliable as my Maxtor turned out to
be.

Note that I don't hold my computer company responsible for this problem
since hard drive life spans only become apparent after several years
have passed since a particular model's introduction. Not only that, but
the person referred to above was right out front about all this.

And yeah, I could send the Maxtor back to the company and get a "free"
replacement but because the drive still holds personal data that can be
recovered, that's not going to happen. It's probably a safe assumption
that Maxtor is very aware such concerns by its customers and depends on
this to alleviate their responsibility.

Not only that, but the three year warranty that I obtained with the
drive no longer exists on their new drives which only come with a meager
one year warranty. So basically, what Maxtor seems to be saying is that
you should expect your hard drive to fail after only a year of use and
that you should be expected to replace it at least that often. What
total bullshit and Maxtor will go the way of the dodo, I'm sure.

I have a Seagate on order and am hoping that the IBM "Deathstar" will
hold out until it arrives. In the mean time though, I'm religiously
backing up to CD.

Hey, believe what you want though.... it's your data. Still, you've been
warned.

 

[S.Heenan]

Most people depend greatly on their hard drive(s) to be (a) reliable
and safe media for storing those files. Well, if you have a Maxtor
hard drive and tend to not back up your stuff, you might want to
think about doing so on either CD, DVD or on a backup hard drive made
by another manufacturer. Here is why:

I'd grown very concerned when Bill O'Brien (of Computer Shopper's
"Hard Edge" fame) at:

http://www.realtechnews.com/

had spoken out against Maxtor, citing the multiple failures he'd
experienced with drives from that manufacturer. Not only that, but
readers of Bill's blog have flooded him with tales of similar woe.

Seems that my concern was very warranted since after less than two
years of usage, my Maxtor Diamondmax Plus ATA 100/60 GB hard drive
has totally failed. Initially the drive started making a clacking
noise at startup and when accessing data. Then the hard drive light
remained on, the master file table got corrupted and finally the
drive crapped out entirely - dead as a doornail.

Luckily I lost no data since, besides backing up to CDR, I always run
two hard drives and use the slave as a backup clone of the master. I'd
just updated the clone too. The bad news is that the hard drive I'm
totally relying on at this point is an IBM Deskstar ATA/100 60 GB,
which it seems from a lot that I've read, is similarly unreliable.

<snip>


Just over a year ago I had four Maxtor hard drives fail within the first
week of use. All were Diamond Max Plus 9 (6Yxxxx) series IIRC. Two became
very hot during operation, well over 60°C. Granted, this is a very small
sample, but four drives in such a short period ? Makes you wonder.

Seagate and WD are my personal choices.

 

[Miss Perspicacia Tick]

A friend of mine is running eight 250meg Maxtor drives in a RAID5
array... He's had two drives fail in four months.

250meg eh, Noozer? ;o) That's all of 2GB. I didn't think drives that old
could be 'RAIDed'. ;o)

 

[petermcmillan_uk]

<snip>


Just over a year ago I had four Maxtor hard drives fail within the first
week of use. All were Diamond Max Plus 9 (6Yxxxx) series IIRC. Two became
very hot during operation, well over 60°C. Granted, this is a very small
sample, but four drives in such a short period ? Makes you wonder.

Seagate and WD are my personal choices.

The Samsungs are supposed to be the quietest these days. I got a 120gb
Seagate 7200.7 hd, but soo realised that Seagate were no longer the
quietest :-(. It is a good drive though.

 

[CK]

I had the same issues with my IBM drives [ replaced 4 in 3 weeks ] guess it
just happens if you get one from a dodgy batch

--
Kind Regards

www.networkingbasics.co.uk
www.ckconsultants.co.uk

<snip>


Just over a year ago I had four Maxtor hard drives fail within the first
week of use. All were Diamond Max Plus 9 (6Yxxxx) series IIRC. Two became
very hot during operation, well over 60°C. Granted, this is a very small
sample, but four drives in such a short period ? Makes you wonder.

Seagate and WD are my personal choices.

The Samsungs are supposed to be the quietest these days. I got a 120gb
Seagate 7200.7 hd, but soo realised that Seagate were no longer the
quietest :-(. It is a good drive though.

 

[Paul Murphy]

<snip>


Just over a year ago I had four Maxtor hard drives fail within the first
week of use. All were Diamond Max Plus 9 (6Yxxxx) series IIRC. Two became
very hot during operation, well over 60°C. Granted, this is a very small
sample, but four drives in such a short period ? Makes you wonder.

Seagate and WD are my personal choices.

The Samsungs are supposed to be the quietest these days. I got a 120gb
Seagate 7200.7 hd, but soo realised that Seagate were no longer the
quietest :-(. It is a good drive though.

I have 4 x Samsung 120 GB drives in a RAID setup (I chose RAID 0+1 rather
than RAID 5) and the only noise I can hear from them is the click and whirr
of them powering up at boot time (and the machine is very quiet in all
respects such as low noise HSFs for both CPUs and a very quiet Tagan PSU).
Even when I run defrag they're still quiet as a mouse and if that wasn't
good enough they can be quietened further with a Samsung supplied acoustic
management utility. The 4 Samsungs and 3Ware RAID card replace a single 100
GB Maxtor I had in the machine which failed just about the time the warranty
expired (Maxtor's Powermax utility came up with an error code on it but it
was otherwise still running fine after 3 years). Given that Maxtor have now
reduced their standard warranty for most drives to 1 year I'd be very weary
of buying such a drive. I bought a 250 GB Maxtor drive just before my 100 GB
one failed (for a different machine) and it developed a fault after running
powermax on it to do a zero fill, it was a drive with a 3 year warranty.
Maxtor replaced both under warranty - I was lucky enough to get a 120 GB
unit as the replacement for the 100 GB. Samsung retail drives come with 3
year warranties in the UK and as long as the size is big enough (currently
the largest is 250 GB but soon to be 400 GB) - they're my drive of choice at
the moment.

Paul

 

[Dee]

There may be bad lots of hard drives, but generalizations are totally
useless.

I have Western Digital, Samsung, Seagate, IBM, Maxtor, and Connor hard
drives that are over 10 years old that are still working. In fact I one
Toshiba drive that is going on 20 years old that is still working. At
the same time I have had Seagate, Western Digital, Connor, Maxtor, and
other drives that have crashed well before I though they should.

Hard drives are a combination of mechanical and electronic components,
none of which are perfect. Look at automobiles and how specific models
are being recalled lately while others aren't.

Life's a bitch! And shit happens!

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

I had the same issues with my IBM drives [ replaced 4 in 3 weeks ] guess it
just happens if you get one from a dodgy batch

Maxtor has been consistently the least reliable manufacturer over the
years. IBM had a bad generation, the 75GXP and to a lesser extent the
60GXP that followed it, but the generations that preceded the 75GXP were
very solid, and as far as I know the drives that came after the 60GXP have
been fine also. Seagate has always had a good reputation. I developed a
video file server system several years ago. As part of the qualification
process for the drives we did extended stress tests on sets of drives from
each manufacturer where we ran the drives doing continuous accesses 24/7
for 30 days. Almost all of the Maxtor drives died as did the IBMs (those
were 75GXP deathstars). The Seagates held up the best and that's what we
went with.

Historically the big difference between Maxtor and Seagate is that Maxtor
never had an enterprise market, they were a consumer drive company only.
Seagate and IBM were enterprise drive companies that also produced
consumer products. Consumers make their decision based on purchase price
alone, they don't calculate the cost of downtime. Enterprises, in theory
at least, try to figure in total cost of ownership. Reliability is worth a
lot which is why companies that cater to the enterprise market worry about
it much more then companies that cater to the consumer market. Companies
with an enterprise culture worry about building a quality product,
companies with a consumer culture worry about getting the last penny of
cost out.

Going forward the problem is that it's becoming harder and harder to
distinguish between enterprise and consumer products. Drive companies were
able to offer SCSI and Fibre Channel drives to the enterprise market and
IDE to consumers. With SATA-II there is no longer a meaningful gap between
the "consumer" interface and the "enterprise" interface. Prior to SATA-II
an ATA drive could only schedule one operation at a time whereas SCSI and
Fibre Channel could schedule many. SATA-II gives that capability to
consumer drives. Also SCSI and Fibre Channel has much higher
bandwidth channels, although as a practical matter the transfer rates
are limited not by channel speed put by the drive heads. Serial SCSI
uses exactly the same physical interface as SATA so there are no
differences in channel bandwidth. As a result the SCSI and Fibre Channel
drives are likely to disappear altogether leaving only one class of drive,
SATA. Since the consumer market is so much larger then the enterprise
market it's highly likely that the cultures of companies like Seagate and
Hitachi/IBM will degrade to the Maxtor level. For now you are still much
better off buying a Seagate drive but I won't venture to say that in 5
years there will still be a difference.

 

[Stillwater]

Most people depend greatly on their hard drive(s) to be (a) reliable and
safe media for storing those files. Well, if you have a Maxtor hard drive
and tend to not back up your stuff, you might want to think about doing so
on either CD, DVD or on a backup hard drive made by another manufacturer.
Here is why:

I'd grown very concerned when Bill O'Brien (of Computer Shopper's "Hard
Edge" fame) at:

http://www.realtechnews.com/

had spoken out against Maxtor, citing the multiple failures he'd
experienced with drives from that manufacturer. Not only that, but readers
of Bill's blog have flooded him with tales of similar woe.

I've also had problems with their 250 gb DM9 drives. I had a 25% failure
rate and am sticking to Seagate. I've had no problems with Hitachi or WD,
but I like the 5 year warranty on the Seagate drives. Plus, they're nice
and quiet.

 

[kony]

There may be bad lots of hard drives, but generalizations are totally
useless.

I have Western Digital, Samsung, Seagate, IBM, Maxtor, and Connor hard
drives that are over 10 years old that are still working. In fact I one
Toshiba drive that is going on 20 years old that is still working. At
the same time I have had Seagate, Western Digital, Connor, Maxtor, and
other drives that have crashed well before I though they should.

Hard drives are a combination of mechanical and electronic components,
none of which are perfect. Look at automobiles and how specific models
are being recalled lately while others aren't.

Life's a bitch! And shit happens!

Hmmm, I agree.

I've over a dozen Maxtors here that are still working fine.
Last drive to fail was a Seagate, previously a Samsung.
Both > 120GB drives died well before their time. I do hear
of slightly more reports of Maxtor failures though but
weighing it against the lower price the primary conclusion I
make is that a penny saved is another penny to put towards
the backup strategy.

It would be interesting though if someone had done a
detailed test of where the drives failed. I don't buy the
argument that they're just "lower quality" in general as
their PCB looks fine. That might leave bearings or platters
or heads or.... gotta be something that can be pinpointed as
statistically problematic else the whole thing drifts more
towards urban legend.

 

[John]

I've also had problems with their 250 gb DM9 drives. I had a 25% failure
rate and am sticking to Seagate. I've had no problems with Hitachi or WD,
but I like the 5 year warranty on the Seagate drives. Plus, they're nice
and quiet.

Everytime someone posts something like this everyone kind of piles on
and maybe its true. I have no idea but its easy to find impressive
sounding blurbs that bash one brand or another and there are always
people have problems with all the brands so then they chime in. I
posted a list of posts the last time with people swearing they had
horrible experiences with Seagate, WD and IBM etc as well has Maxtor.

Its not that Maxtor is great I dont know that they might very well be
worse than other brands but like I said Ive bought a fair amount of
Maxtors way back to the 90s and havent had one failure yet and though
Ive gotten rid of a lot of them they are still running in PCs of
people I still know without any problems.

Heres a good example. My personal one. The one brand Ive had problems
with recently -- a neighbors WD 80 gig went belly up still spins but
you cant access it at all after 1.2 years or so.

My recent (few months old WD 200 gig ) has been a little flakey and
this morning by coincidence it did the click click thing and wouldnt
boot up which made my hair stand on end . After trying to reboot
twice it worked. I have that PACKEd with data from my old PC so that
scared the bejezus out of me. based on my experience and doing a
simple search on the net heres a post that comes up right away in
Google from 2003 that sounds impressive. And yet Im still going to buy
WDs --- until I see definitive proof they have massive problems on all
their models. Its hard to take it THAT seriously because doing a
simple search you see this kind of stuff on every brand with people
who swear they sell them or their friend works in a lab and 99% of 100
of them they bought in a row blew up in 5 min. Then they go to say
not that some or one model may be bad or that they might have a higher
incidence but imply that 99.99% will fail within 1 month or something
really exaggerated like that.

Thats not to say as I said I have any proof that Maxtors dont have
more problems either. One thing I tend to see is people always have
stories of failures and tend to look at the length of warranties as a
indication of quality. So maybe the big discounts and shortening of
Maxtors warranty had a big impact on the perceived quality of Maxtor
drives which tends to make these stories snowball. For a long time
Seagate didnt do the drastic rebate sale thing but now they are, And
to give them credit they still offer 5 year and longer than 3 yr
warranties on many of their sales though not all. I checked and the
ones going through Compusa - some do and some dont. Some recent ones
I checked had 1 yr warranties.


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



http://www.eio.com/public/harddrv/0529.html

As a former tech for Western Digital, it comes highly recommened to
purchase Maxtor, Seagate, IBM, or Samsung drives.


WD has changed their warranty to one year because the new CEO has
changed WD from the cadilac of hard drives to the cheap "reveal" brand
(remember them)


Company memo quote "Quality means nothing anymore in this industry,
its all about quanity" Well, they hit the quanity on the head. WD has
more than a 10 fold in RMA drives putting the failure rate at nearly
11% or about 8% higher than any other drive on the market today.
Infact most of the RMA replacement drives are other customer drives
that are checked over and sent back out. So an intermintant drive
could reach 10 users before it is finaly pulled for repair.


The amount of loss the company has taken in the last quater has forced
the company to close their support centers and switch to an out source
call center with only 90 days free support after purchase and after
that all support calls will be charged to your credit card.


Even though I no longer work for them, it is still to bad to see this
happen. Even while I and other still worked their, most of us would
purchase Maxtor drives for our own use.


Here is a list of drive that top the RMA watch out list.
WORST
WD200EB
WD400EB
WD400BB
WD800BB
WD800JB
WD2000BB
WD2000JB
OK, BUT NOT GREAT
WD200BB
WD300BB
WD600BB
WD1200BB
WD1200JB
MIGHT WORK
WD1600BB
WD1600JB
WD1800BB
WD1800JB


Take this info for what its worth. If you are having luck with WD
drives, good for you, I hope it holds out. If you have never bought a
WD drive before, don't start now.

 

[Noozer]

250meg eh, Noozer? ;o) That's all of 2GB. I didn't think drives that old
could be 'RAIDed'. ;o)

Doh.. OKOK.. I'm a dumbass...

Eight 250Gig drives...

 

[philo]

Most people depend greatly on their hard drive(s) to be (a) reliable and
safe media for storing those files. Well, if you have a Maxtor hard
drive and tend to not back up your stuff, you might want to think about
doing so on either CD, DVD or on a backup hard drive made by another
manufacturer. Here is why:

I'd grown very concerned when Bill O'Brien (of Computer Shopper's "Hard
Edge" fame) at:

http://www.realtechnews.com/

had spoken out against Maxtor, citing the multiple failures he'd
experienced with drives from that manufacturer. Not only that, but
readers of Bill's blog have flooded him with tales of similar woe.

Seems that my concern was very warranted since after less than two years
of usage, my Maxtor Diamondmax Plus ATA 100/60 GB hard drive has totally
failed. Initially the drive started making a clacking noise at startup
and when accessing data. Then the hard drive light remained on, the
master file table got corrupted and finally the drive crapped out
entirely - dead as a doornail.

Luckily I lost no data since, besides backing up to CDR, I always run
two hard drives and use the slave as a backup clone of the master. I'd
just updated the clone too. The bad news is that the hard drive I'm
totally relying on at this point is an IBM Deskstar ATA/100 60 GB, which
it seems from a lot that I've read, is similarly unreliable. Not only
that, but it's at the end of the apparent lifespan attributed to it by
several of the negative reviews it's received.

During a phone conversation with my computer company's head of technical
support (both company and person will remain unnamed), he told me his
observations had led to the conclusion that Maxtor hard drives are
*very* unreliable and that Seagate drives are the way to go. He also
warned me that his experience has shown that the IBM Deskstar which came
with my computer will be about as reliable as my Maxtor turned out to be.

Note that I don't hold my computer company responsible for this problem
since hard drive life spans only become apparent after several years
have passed since a particular model's introduction. Not only that, but
the person referred to above was right out front about all this.

And yeah, I could send the Maxtor back to the company and get a "free"
replacement but because the drive still holds personal data that can be
recovered, that's not going to happen. It's probably a safe assumption
that Maxtor is very aware such concerns by its customers and depends on
this to alleviate their responsibility.

Not only that, but the three year warranty that I obtained with the
drive no longer exists on their new drives which only come with a meager
one year warranty. So basically, what Maxtor seems to be saying is that
you should expect your hard drive to fail after only a year of use and
that you should be expected to replace it at least that often. What
total bullshit and Maxtor will go the way of the dodo, I'm sure.

I have a Seagate on order and am hoping that the IBM "Deathstar" will
hold out until it arrives. In the mean time though, I'm religiously
backing up to CD.

Hey, believe what you want though.... it's your data. Still, you've been
warned.

i build a lot of computers and have used many brands of drives...
and through the years i've had at least one failure from just about every
brand...

although i have not seen more maxtor drive fail that any other brand...
i did have one fail after only 4 weeks or so!
i'm leaning more toward seagate now...
and as long as they hold up and keep a good warranty...will prob. stick with
them

 

[Al Smith]

Most people depend greatly on their hard drive(s) to be (a) reliable and safe media for storing those files. Well, if you have a Maxtor hard drive and tend to not back up your stuff, you might want to think about doing so on either CD, DVD or on a backup hard drive made by another manufacturer. Here is why:

I'd grown very concerned when Bill O'Brien (of Computer Shopper's "Hard Edge" fame) at:

http://www.realtechnews.com/

had spoken out against Maxtor, citing the multiple failures he'd experienced with drives from that manufacturer. Not only that, but readers of Bill's blog have flooded him with tales of similar woe.

I have to agree. I had two Maxtors fail after very light use. I
wouldn't buy another Maxtor. I went out of my way to get Western
Digital when I replaced them. I'd trust Seagate also.

 

[CBFalconer]

250meg eh, Noozer? ;o) That's all of 2GB. I didn't think drives
that old could be 'RAIDed'. ;o)

Somewhere around here I have a 15 Meg full height MFM drive - is he
in the market for it? That was unlimited room when I first got it.

 

[Thagor]

I have to agree. I had two Maxtors fail after very light use. I
wouldn't buy another Maxtor. I went out of my way to get Western
Digital when I replaced them. I'd trust Seagate also.

I have the job of removing platters from these defective drives for
security reasons. Of all the drives I've opened, the newer maxtors appear
cheap of craftsmanship and quality. From 80GB on up, I can tell these
drives weren't built to last very long. Not true for the older models
though. I have a 18GB that has lasted me for years and still kicks.

Just as is reported in this thread, if I were to buy one for my own use,
it would be a Seagate. At least until they start getting cheap too.

 

[Kev]

Somewhere around here I have a 15 Meg full height MFM drive - is he
in the market for it? That was unlimited room when I first got it.

I have an 80MB SCSI from an 040LC Mac laying around someplace, if
interested.