Need advise on choosing Maxtors

[Toshi1873]

I had a Maxtor 7200 rpm 20 GB (this was some years back) that ran hot
and failed two months from new. So I put the replacement in a fan-
cooled cage.

Guess what! This failed after two months. Its replacement, 5400 27GB,
is nice and cool and still going strong.

Checked the power-supply voltages? (Which would be next
on my checklist.)

Anyway, last 3 drives I've lost have been due to heat
issues (7200rpm SATA Maxtor, 7200rpm PATA Maxtor, 40GB
IBM 7200rpm PATA)... I'm getting quite good at killing
them.

 

[Kevin]

I run nothing but Maxtor, and so do my friends. Have had ZERO problems
with them. That's 6 drives, Zero problems.

I have to go with everyone that says no problems with mactor. I've been
running a maxtor 40GB drive for 3+ years and have had no trouble from it. I
have however had 4 WD drives between my computer and my parents fail that
ran much hotter than the maxtors. The WD drives only lasted approx 1-2
years on average

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

I'll back him up on that.

So will I. I work for a uni department. All our IDE drive failures
recently have been Maxtors, many less than two years old. They develop
bad sectors which get more and more numerous.

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

Seagates have only a 1-year warranty

Wrong. It's now five years. Whether you wish to interpret that as a
vote of confidence in their products, or marketing bollocks, is up to
you.

 

[J. Clarke]

So will I. I work for a uni department. All our IDE drive failures
recently have been Maxtors, many less than two years old. They develop
bad sectors which get more and more numerous.

What percentage of drives installed in the systems for which you are
responsible are Maxtors?

 

[Ken]

Wrong. It's now five years. Whether you wish to interpret
that as a vote of confidence in their products,
or marketing bollocks, is up to you.

Yes, Seagate have 5 years
http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,2285,00.html

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

What percentage of drives installed in the systems for which you are
responsible are Maxtors?

In the last 2 years, 90% Maxtor, 5% Quantum, 5% Fujitsu. That's for PC-
type IDE drives. The saving grace of the Maxtors is that they tend to
fail with increasing numbers of bas sectors; when a user contacts me to
say they're getting odd messages from the Linux kernel about disk CRC
errors on the screen, I at least know I have a chance to copy most of
their data to tape. With other makes of drive, failure tends to be
sudden and results in total loss of data.

SCSI failures are a different kettle of fish altogether; we've had a few
disk failures in our HPaq Tru64 UNIX workstations.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

"Mike Tomlinson" replied:

J. Clarke asked:


In the last 2 years, 90% Maxtor, 5% Quantum, 5% Fujitsu.
That's for PC-type IDE drives.

Hmmmm... 90% of the drives in the department are Maxtors,
and all "recent" failures were Maxtors. Hmmmm......

*TimDaniels*

 

[J. Clarke]

In the last 2 years, 90% Maxtor, 5% Quantum, 5% Fujitsu. That's for PC-
type IDE drives. The saving grace of the Maxtors is that they tend to
fail with increasing numbers of bas sectors; when a user contacts me to
say they're getting odd messages from the Linux kernel about disk CRC
errors on the screen, I at least know I have a chance to copy most of
their data to tape. With other makes of drive, failure tends to be
sudden and results in total loss of data.

SCSI failures are a different kettle of fish altogether; we've had a few
disk failures in our HPaq Tru64 UNIX workstations.

So let's see, 90 percent of the machines you support have Maxtor drives and
most of the drives you see fail are Maxtor. If I might ask, what _else_
would they be? If most of them were from that 10% that were Quantum or
Fujitsu that might mean something.

Increasing bad sectors is the normal failure mode for IDE drives.

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

So let's see, 90 percent of the machines you support have Maxtor drives and
most of the drives you see fail are Maxtor.

No, I'm sorry, I misread your question. My apologies. I thought you
were asking "what percentage of *failed* drives you support were..."
and that is the question I answered. ~90% of our FAILED drives, of all
of them in the last ~3 years, have been Maxtor. ~5% were Quantum and
~5% Fujitsu.

Increasing bad sectors is the normal failure mode for IDE drives.

I disagree. You will find many marginal IDE drives will continue to
work without obvious indication of a problem *to the user* right up to
the point that power to their host system is interrupted. On
restoration of power, inevitably a proportion of drives will not come
back up.

Our office is on an estate where JCBs are prone to dig up the power
cables and cut power to our building. Our servers are well protected
with UPSes etc.; our desktops aren't.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

No, I'm sorry, I misread your question. My apologies.

So what *is* your answer to his *original* question:
" What percentage of drives installed in the systems for which you are
responsible are Maxtors?"

I thought you
were asking "what percentage of *failed* drives you support were..."
and that is the question I answered. ~90% of our FAILED drives, of all
of them in the last ~3 years, have been Maxtor. ~5% were Quantum and
~5% Fujitsu.


I disagree. You will find many marginal IDE drives will continue to
work without obvious indication of a problem *to the user* right up to
the point that power to their host system is interrupted. On
restoration of power, inevitably a proportion of drives will not come
back up.

Using them 24/7 is not a normal situation for IDE drives.

 

[J. Clarke]

No, I'm sorry, I misread your question. My apologies. I thought you
were asking "what percentage of *failed* drives you support were..."
and that is the question I answered. ~90% of our FAILED drives, of all
of them in the last ~3 years, have been Maxtor. ~5% were Quantum and
~5% Fujitsu.

And you still haven't answered the question.

I disagree. You will find many marginal IDE drives will continue to
work without obvious indication of a problem *to the user* right up to
the point that power to their host system is interrupted. On
restoration of power, inevitably a proportion of drives will not come
back up.

"Inevitably"? You mean that every time you power down your machines a
certain percentage don't come back up? That's not a drive problem, that's
a power problem.

And you can disagree all you want to, increasing bad sectors is
characteristic behavior of a crashed drive. This gets masked by the
hot-sparing that all modern drives implement and is why you should be
running a SMART monitor.

Our office is on an estate where JCBs are prone to dig up the power
cables and cut power to our building. Our servers are well protected
with UPSes etc.; our desktops aren't.

Shouldn't be causing drive failures. Might be causing windows failures.

 

[Daniel Prince]

Wrong. It's now five years. Whether you wish to interpret that as a
vote of confidence in their products, or marketing bollocks, is up to
you.

How good is Seagate at replacing bad drives? Will they cross ship a new
drive so that one can copy the good data off of the failing drive to the
new drive?

What is the largest Seagate PATA drive with a five year warranty? Thank
you in advance for all replies.

 

[J. Clarke]

How good is Seagate at replacing bad drives? Will they cross ship a new
drive so that one can copy the good data off of the failing drive to the
new drive?

In general no. Like all drive manufacturers they expect you to have good
backups--trying to pull data off a failing drive is usually a losing
proposition. If you're worried about drive failure then go RAID.

What is the largest Seagate PATA drive with a five year warranty? Thank
you in advance for all replies.

200 GB.

 

[CSMR]

Wooducooduwrote:
if you're worried about getting one with a JVC motor I have a SP1614N
with a Nidec motor I was thinking of selling
I'm looking for one of these. Still thinking of selling it?