so what is the deal with maxtor's bad reputation ???

[J. Clarke]

Arno Wagner wrote:
On 15 Feb 2006, Arno Wagner wrote:
[snip]
Now where did I see that lovely little table showing drive
reliabilty (for all models) comparing manufacturers and drawing on
some
reasonable data. Was it at StorageReview? It wasn't this table
but anyway this is interesting in its own way:

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/computer/data-backup.htm

Does not surpris me. Many people try to convince themselves that
their own choices are good ones. Often they even continue to do
so when evidence to the contrary comes to their attention.

I find it interesting that he lists LaCie as a drive
manufacturer--LaCie does not make drives, they buy Seagate, Hitachi,
Maxtor, WD, Samsung, etc drives and put them in boxes with a "Lacie"
sticker on the front.

So now you know how to make those Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor,
WD, Samsung drives more reliable. Just put the magic sticker on.

I would have thought you'd be aware that certain manufacturing / process
control / quality control issues would be part of the process of "making
a drive more reliable" - but then I could be wrong.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I _think_ that Folkert might have actually been
attempting humor. If so, his effort is to be applauded--he needs to do
that more often.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

"J. Clarke" wrote in message news:[email protected]

"J. Clarke" wrote in message Arno Wagner wrote:
On 15 Feb 2006, Arno Wagner wrote:

[snip]
Now where did I see that lovely little table showing drive reliabilty
(for all models) comparing manufacturers and drawing on some
reasonable data. Was it at StorageReview? It wasn't this table
but anyway this is interesting in its own way:

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/computer/data-backup.htm

Does not surpris me. Many people try to convince themselves that
their own choices are good ones. Often they even continue to do
so when evidence to the contrary comes to their attention.

I find it interesting that he lists LaCie as a drive manufacturer--LaCie
does not make drives, they buy Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, WD, Samsung,
etc drives and put them in boxes with a "Lacie" sticker on the front.

So now you know how to make those Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor,
WD, Samsung drives more reliable. Just put the magic sticker on.

I would have thought you'd be aware that certain manufacturing / process
control / quality control issues would be part of the process of "making
a drive more reliable" - but then I could be wrong.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I _think_ that Folkert might have actually been
attempting humor.

You'd think?

If so,

Yup, who's to tell, eh.
It needs someone to understand humor and obviously that doesn't
include present company or you would have understood that stinky*
the troll here obviously wasn't serious either. (Right, Duncan?).

his effort is to be applauded--he needs to do that more often.

I'm doing it all the time but as the proverb says, it's "pearls before swine".

* OdieFerrous <=> odiferous

 

[Odie Ferrous]

"J. Clarke" wrote in message news:[email protected]

Folkert Rienstra wrote:
"J. Clarke" wrote in message Arno Wagner wrote:
On 15 Feb 2006, Arno Wagner wrote:

[snip]
Now where did I see that lovely little table showing drive reliabilty
(for all models) comparing manufacturers and drawing on some
reasonable data. Was it at StorageReview? It wasn't this table
but anyway this is interesting in its own way:

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/computer/data-backup.htm

Does not surpris me. Many people try to convince themselves that
their own choices are good ones. Often they even continue to do
so when evidence to the contrary comes to their attention.

I find it interesting that he lists LaCie as a drive manufacturer--LaCie
does not make drives, they buy Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, WD, Samsung,
etc drives and put them in boxes with a "Lacie" sticker on the front.

So now you know how to make those Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor,
WD, Samsung drives more reliable. Just put the magic sticker on.

I would have thought you'd be aware that certain manufacturing / process
control / quality control issues would be part of the process of "making
a drive more reliable" - but then I could be wrong.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I _think_ that Folkert might have actually been
attempting humor.

You'd think?

If so,

Yup, who's to tell, eh.
It needs someone to understand humor and obviously that doesn't
include present company or you would have understood that stinky*
the troll here obviously wasn't serious either. (Right, Duncan?).

his effort is to be applauded--he needs to do that more often.

I'm doing it all the time but as the proverb says, it's "pearls before swine".

* OdieFerrous <=> odiferous

Highly commendable, Folkert - that was precisely how I originally came
up with the name.


Odie (for short)

 

[Odie Ferrous]

Arno Wagner wrote:
On 15 Feb 2006, Arno Wagner wrote:

[snip]
Now where did I see that lovely little table showing drive
reliabilty (for all models) comparing manufacturers and drawing
on some reasonable data. Was it at StorageReview? It wasn't
this table but anyway this is interesting in its own way:

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/computer/data-backup.htm

Does not surpris me. Many people try to convince themselves that
their own choices are good ones. Often they even continue to do
so when evidence to the contrary comes to their attention.

I find it interesting that he lists LaCie as a drive
manufacturer--LaCie does not make drives, they buy Seagate,
Hitachi, Maxtor, WD, Samsung, etc drives and put them in boxes with
a "Lacie" sticker on the front.

So now you know how to make those Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor,
WD, Samsung drives more reliable. Just put the magic sticker on.

I would have thought you'd be aware that certain manufacturing /
process control / quality control issues would be part of the process
of "making a drive more reliable" - but then I could be wrong.

I bet its much more about how its designed in the first place,
most obviously with how it gets rid of the heat thats produced etc.

Or do you think drives are manufactured by the Lego principle?

Nope, but I doubt that a properly designed drive should
be hard to manufacture at a very low failure rate now.

The trouble is, the manufacturers seem to work to a price point, and
little else.

Look at the buyers of drives; "I bought a Maxtor 300GB drive because it
was $5.23 cheaper than the Seagate."

Not "I spent a little extra for the Seagate because I believe it to be
more reliable than the Maxtor."

And because China appears to have taken control of the world's
manufacturing, and "quality control" is still not a concept they
understand, little wonder modern drives seem to be so fragile.



Odie

 

[Rod Speed]

Folkert Rienstra wrote:

Arno Wagner wrote:
On 15 Feb 2006, Arno Wagner wrote:

[snip]
Now where did I see that lovely little table showing drive
reliabilty (for all models) comparing manufacturers and drawing
on some reasonable data. Was it at StorageReview? It wasn't
this table but anyway this is interesting in its own way:

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/computer/data-backup.htm

Does not surpris me. Many people try to convince themselves that
their own choices are good ones. Often they even continue to do
so when evidence to the contrary comes to their attention.

I find it interesting that he lists LaCie as a drive
manufacturer--LaCie does not make drives, they buy Seagate,
Hitachi, Maxtor, WD, Samsung, etc drives and put them in boxes
with a "Lacie" sticker on the front.

So now you know how to make those Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor,
WD, Samsung drives more reliable. Just put the magic sticker on.

I would have thought you'd be aware that certain manufacturing /
process control / quality control issues would be part of the
process of "making a drive more reliable" - but then I could be
wrong.

I bet its much more about how its designed in the first place,
most obviously with how it gets rid of the heat thats produced etc.

Or do you think drives are manufactured by the Lego principle?

Nope, but I doubt that a properly designed drive should
be hard to manufacture at a very low failure rate now.

The trouble is, the manufacturers seem
to work to a price point, and little else.

Sure, but decent design doesnt necessarily cost anything,
particularly when you factor in the cost of warranty etc.

Look at the buyers of drives; "I bought a Maxtor 300GB
drive because it was $5.23 cheaper than the Seagate."

I doubt too many do it as mindlessly as that.

Not "I spent a little extra for the Seagate because
I believe it to be more reliable than the Maxtor."

Some do just that. Or pay a little more for the 5 year warranty.

And because China appears to have taken
control of the world's manufacturing,

No it hasnt, few hard drives are made there.

and "quality control" is still not a concept they understand,
little wonder modern drives seem to be so fragile.

Like I said, a properly designed drive should be hard
to manufacture at a very low failure rate now.

AND Seagate is one of the few drive manufacturers
that actually manufacturers in China.

You can now furiously inspect your Seagate drives and see
if the ones that failed at that obscene rate came from china |-)

 

[Rod Speed]

"J. Clarke" wrote in message news:[email protected]

Folkert Rienstra wrote:
"J. Clarke" wrote in message Arno Wagner wrote:
On 15 Feb 2006, Arno Wagner wrote:

[snip]
Now where did I see that lovely little table showing drive
reliabilty (for all models) comparing manufacturers and drawing
on some reasonable data. Was it at StorageReview? It wasn't
this table
but anyway this is interesting in its own way:

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/computer/data-backup.htm

Does not surpris me. Many people try to convince themselves that
their own choices are good ones. Often they even continue to do
so when evidence to the contrary comes to their attention.

I find it interesting that he lists LaCie as a drive
manufacturer--LaCie does not make drives, they buy Seagate,
Hitachi, Maxtor, WD, Samsung, etc drives and put them in boxes
with a "Lacie" sticker on the front.

So now you know how to make those Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor,
WD, Samsung drives more reliable. Just put the magic sticker on.

I would have thought you'd be aware that certain manufacturing /
process control / quality control issues would be part of the
process of "making a drive more reliable" - but then I could be
wrong.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I _think_ that Folkert might have actually
been attempting humor.

You'd think?

If so,

Yup, who's to tell, eh.
It needs someone to understand humor and obviously that doesn't
include present company or you would have understood that stinky*
the troll here obviously wasn't serious either. (Right, Duncan?).

his effort is to be applauded--he needs to do that more often.

I'm doing it all the time but as the proverb says, it's "pearls before
swine".

Just another ****wit schweinehund.

 

[Rob Nicholson]

I recently bought a new mobo with nforce4 chipset, and a SATA-2 HDD to

I'm currently going through an unstable home system with an AMD64 nForce4
based chipset with a Maxtor HDD. I've had more than usual number of hard
disk related quirks recently and the majority of cases seem to have been
with Maxtor. This could be though that more Maxtor's sell therefore more are
going to fail.

I'm going to stop my normal home practice of sorting my price on Dabs and
picking the cheapest

Rob.

 

[Neill Massello]

I'm going to stop my normal home practice of sorting my price on Dabs and
picking the cheapest

Price isn't a reliable indicator either. Brand is better, but hardly
infallible. (Ask those who bought IBM 75GXP drives.) The best you can do
is to keep an ear to the hard drive grapevine and be wary about new
models, especially those touted as having some whizbang new technology.

 

[Mark M]

You'd think?


Yup, who's to tell, eh.
It needs someone to understand humor and obviously that doesn't
include present company or you would have understood that
stinky* the troll here obviously wasn't serious either. (Right,
Duncan?).


I'm doing it all the time but as the proverb says, it's "pearls
before swine".

Keep on smiling Folkie. Smiling suits you a lot better than
growling!

 

[Mark M]

I agree that these drives likely have changed, if only because
the situation was very costly for Maxtor with all the warranty
returns. My DiamondMax 9 plus are all from 2003, and they
definitely do not compare to Samsung. They are relatively loud
and produce a lot of heat. As I said, still reliable with good
cooling, i.e. fan directly before or under the disk. I have
about 30 from 2003, about 20 from 2004, they all run 24/7 and so
far I had one failure that I could not trace down to mishandling
in transport. But they all run in an air-conditioned room with
20C air temperature and all have fans that take in air from the
front and blow it directly over the disks.

Jeeze, Arno! Are you sure you have enough hard drives?

If you have a couple of spare ones then I can take them off your
hands. Heh!

 

[Arno Wagner]

Price isn't a reliable indicator either. Brand is better, but hardly
infallible. (Ask those who bought IBM 75GXP drives.) The best you can do
is to keep an ear to the hard drive grapevine and be wary about new
models, especially those touted as having some whizbang new technology.

Unfortunately you are perfectly correct. That is one of the main
reasons I read this NG.

One more data-point: Maxtor HDDs are a bit more expensive here than
comparable Samsung HDDs. Seems to me it should be the other way
round.

Arno

 

[Arno Wagner]

On 15 Feb 2006, Arno Wagner wrote:

Jeeze, Arno! Are you sure you have enough hard drives?

If you have a couple of spare ones then I can take them off your
hands. Heh!

Unfortunately not. There is a lot of measurement data on these.
All are needed....

Arno

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Unfortunately you are perfectly correct.

That is one of the main reasons I read this NG.

No you don't, that just an excuse to be here and babble.

 

[chrisv]

Price isn't a reliable indicator either. Brand is better, but hardly
infallible. (Ask those who bought IBM 75GXP drives.) The best you can do
is to keep an ear to the hard drive grapevine and be wary about new
models, especially those touted as having some whizbang new technology.

Utter nonsense. The 75GXP is very relaible and a few wackos have a
posting history of such anti-IBM slime like you.

 

[Rob Nicholson]

models, especially those touted as having some whizbang new technology.

Like AMD, nForce 4, command queuing and Maxtor in the same sentence.
Disabled command queuing on my home PC and the Maxtor is behaving itself a
lot more.

Rob.

 

[Beemer Biker]

I have had many different HDDs in my computers for the last 10 years,
and never suffered any hdd death or loss of data. Maybe I was just lucky.

I haven't been too worried about being at the bleeding edge of access
times and sustained transfer speeds, and I have tried P-ATA RAID0 with
various combinations of drives. I think I have owned maxtors, seagates,
western digitals, IBM, and many other brands, without noticing any
substantial performance difference, in a common office computer computer
setting, in which one machine has slowly become a gaming machine, a
video editing platform, a web and ftp server, etc...

I recently bought a new mobo with nforce4 chipset, and a SATA-2 HDD to
go with it. Again, not driven by a need for absolute need for silence or
performance, I trusted my dealer and bough a Western Digital Caviar (8MB
cache, 250GB). The drive's idle spinning noise was so much louder that I
brought it back and chose something else. The dealer almost laughed at
me when I picked the Maxtor Maxline III, much louder, hotter, slower and
not reliable.

1) access is louder, and idle noise is almost inaudible, as silent as my
other Maxtor 300 GB DiamondMax10 SATA1

2) hotter ? running behind a 12cm fan in a Coolermaster Stacker, I don't
see much difference.

3) Probably in real life I won't see a difference, but in HDTach (FWIW),
I get lower access times, higher burst and sustained read speed in the
maxtor.

4)less reliable ????? Based on statistics ? Items returned by customers
? "No, by reputation" he said. And indeed many people in the internet
seem to think like this.

They made a mistake years ago calling their drives "Big Foot". They were
stuck with a bunch of 5.25 when everyone else was getting 3.5 out the door.
They raised the capacity up slightly maxing it out, and came out with that
big foot name. They also bought out miniscribe, a company that got caught
inflating their inventory by putting bricks in boxes. That has pretty much
stuck with them.

At the company I work for, I would drop by our tech office every friday and
look in the trash and pull out the maxtor. They had a rubber pad under the
pcb that would harden and the pcb would not make good contact with the
pickups of the mechanical part of the drive causing the drive to fail. An
easy fix if you got time to remove the pcb and replace the material.

 

[Rod Speed]

They made a mistake years ago calling their drives "Big Foot".

That was Quantum, not Maxtor, and that
was just one of Quantum's line of drives.

They were stuck with a bunch of 5.25 when
everyone else was getting 3.5 out the door.

Wrong, Quantum had 3.5" drives at that time too.

The BigFoots were just a weird sideline for Quantum.

They raised the capacity up slightly maxing
it out, and came out with that big foot name.

Utterly mangled.

They also bought out miniscribe, a company that
got caught inflating their inventory by putting bricks
in boxes. That has pretty much stuck with them.

Mindlessly silly.

At the company I work for, I would drop by our tech office
every friday and look in the trash and pull out the maxtor.
They had a rubber pad under the pcb that would harden and
the pcb would not make good contact with the pickups of the
mechanical part of the drive causing the drive to fail. An easy
fix if you got time to remove the pcb and replace the material.

That wasnt true of all maxtor drives.

 

[Beemer Biker]

That was Quantum, not Maxtor, and that
was just one of Quantum's line of drives.

quantum is one of maxtor's lines, maxtor bought out their disk drive stuff
sometime in 2000. even though the bigfoot predated that merger, it counts
as "good will:"

Wrong, Quantum had 3.5" drives at that time too.

Actually, "Right, Quantum also had 3.5" but they had to get rid of their
5.25 and hyped the big foot.

The BigFoots were just a weird sideline for Quantum.


Utterly mangled.


Mindlessly silly.

but true, and as I recall, the auditing firm that approved the "bricks in
the diskdrive boxes" had major problems All this counts as "good will"
Usually, good will works for you when, for example, you buy out a medical
practive from a retiring physican. You dont care about his tools, all you
want is his customers who think highly of him. Maxtor needed production
and bought it, unfortunatly, they also got the "good will" like the bricks
in disk drive boxes and the "big foot".

I own several maxstor's and am happy, no problems. I also got some high
priced seagate that I have had to update the firmware as they had problems
with the raid controller. The maxtor's have mp3 and music and god know what
my kids put on them. The seagates have mission critical stuff.

That wasnt true of all maxtor drives.

Yes, unfortunatly nowaways, when we throw them out they are really dead.

my 2c about maxtor's bad reputation

 

[Rod Speed]

quantum is one of maxtor's lines, maxtor bought out their disk drive
stuff sometime in 2000. even though the bigfoot predated that
merger, it counts as "good will:"

Irrelevant to whether Maxtor did the Big Foot and the Big Foots
were just ONE of Quantum's lines at the time of the introduction
of the Big Foots. They had 3.5" drives as well as the Big Foots.

Actually, "Right, Quantum also had 3.5"

Nope, you claim that 'they were stuck with a bunch of
5.25 when everyone else was getting 3.5 out the door'
is just plain wrong. Quantum had the nutty idea that
the 5.25" format had some life left in it, basically
because of the much bigger platters that those involved.
They decided that that was a cost effective approach
for their most cost effective line in the $/GB sense.

but they had to get rid of their 5.25 and hyped the big foot.

Completely wrong. The Big Foots came after
they had stopped shipping 5.25" drives.

but true,

The last sentence isnt. Its just plain wrong. The brick
episode was just a result of miniscribe going bust.

and as I recall, the auditing firm that approved the
"bricks in the diskdrive boxes" had major problems
All this counts as "good will"

No it doesnt and says absolutely NOTHING about what
happened within Maxtor after they bought Miniscribe.

Usually, good will works for you when, for example, you buy
out a medical practive from a retiring physican. You dont care
about his tools, all you want is his customers who think highly
of him. Maxtor needed production and bought it, unfortunatly,
they also got the "good will" like the bricks in disk drive boxes

No they didnt.

and the "big foot".

They didnt get that either, Quantum had stopped
shipping those before Maxtor bought out Quantum.

I own several maxstor's and am happy, no problems.

Irrelevant to your complete mangling of the story above.

I also got some high priced seagate that I have had to update
the firmware as they had problems with the raid controller.

Irrelevant to your complete mangling of the story above.

The maxtor's have mp3 and music and god know what my
kids put on them. The seagates have mission critical stuff.

Irrelevant to your complete mangling of the story above.

Yes, unfortunatly nowaways, when we throw them out they are really dead.

my 2c about maxtor's bad reputation

I demand a refund.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Neill Massello wrote:

Utter nonsense. The 75GXP is very relaible and a few wackos have a
posting history of such anti-IBM slime like you.

Funny. Then why do I have two dead ones in a case where neither before
nor afterwards any other drives died? And why did the one I used at
work die? And the ones several other people at work used?

Arno