Maxtor Debate

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pete
  • Start date Start date
P

Pete

I've had a Maxtor hard disk for several years now, and it's working
perfectly. It's not loud, it's fast, and I'm happy so far. Anyone else??
=Pete
 
Pete said:
I've had a Maxtor hard disk for several years now, and it's working
perfectly. It's not loud, it's fast, and I'm happy so far. Anyone else??
=Pete
Click to expand...

Me, me! I had a Maxtor drive under daily start-up and use for
4 years before I retired it as an archive and switched to Maxtor
DiamondMax Plus 9s. I've had those for more than a year, now,
with no problems. Perhaps their longevity is related to their cooling.
The original was mounted vertically in front of the air entering the
case (a Dell design), but the new ones are mounted both vertically
and horizontally and are past their one year warranty with no problems -
noise or otherwise.

*TimDaniels*
 
Pete said:
I've had a Maxtor hard disk for several years now, and it's working
perfectly. It's not loud, it's fast, and I'm happy so far. Anyone else??
Click to expand...

I've used Maxtors almost exclusively and never had a failure of any kind, I
have three in my current machine.
 
I've had a Maxtor hard disk for several years now, and it's working
perfectly. It's not loud, it's fast, and I'm happy so far. Anyone else??
=Pete
Click to expand...

Tons of people and there are tons of people who have problems with HDs
all the time. Thats why its almost impossible to tell if any of these
stories actually mean anything. Usually when a few people post
something really strong about one brand or another it attracts the
horror stories about that brand and it snowballs.

I mean the stories about Maxtor arent that it has a slightly higher
failure rate or something like that which would be hard to claim
anyway unless you had access to large numbers of stats but that HD
after HD literally fails in their systems --- which I hear with MBs ,
HDs all the time from a few posters. And thats what makes it so
suspicious. I mean a really huge failure rate. And like I posted
you see the exact same type of stories posted everywhere all the time
with almost all the brands. The only brand that was immune was IBM
since it got rave reviews at websites like storage review I think and
others and people would post all the time like you were a moron if you
even dared to criticize IBM HDs which smart people knew were far
superior to all other drives. They had a really strong loyal
following. Then of course after they had problems with that one model
everyone said they were horrible.

And Ive posted Ive bought a fair amount of Maxtors -- cant remember
since I end up buying them for friends and relatives since they all
dont know anything about PCs and since Maxtors have always been
discounted the most here thats primarily what I bought. And lets see
---- ZERO have failed or even had problems. From 30-40 megs (cant
remember the exact size) , 4-5 60 megs , several larger ones up to
120 meg and several 160 I think and 200 giggers. Iv e been running a
120 and 200 for a while now with no problems along with my WD 200 gig
I just got that has been slightly weird (clicking when trying to boot
and failure to boot once and a few other problems) and Ive seen a
neighbors WD 80 gig fail. Thats about it.

The only other HD Ive actually seen fail was ages ago - a Conner I
bought in the 90s which failed. And they were bought by Seagate I
think. I still have a 120 meg Maxtor that runs and a 6 gig Maxtor HD
that I use to test my PCs out with a barebones WIN XP Pro install.

Now as Ive said that DOESNT mean Maxtor doesnt have a problem.
Just that many of these people who imply 80% of them blow up are
grossly exaggerating and that its hard to tell any really significant
trend from the usual noise about HD problems that always goes on.
See heres another sample :

From Anandtech

iv had 3 seagate drives die on me... and 0 WD (running 3 WD drives
atm)

Well personally I have had a few problems with Seagate drives. 3 have
died terminally on me.... I now have 2 x WD 200Gb drives. Quiet,
reliable, fast and no signs of dying yet.






Another from a website though these are about SCSI seagates :

Seagate Has A Problem

At Bloglines, we have 3 classes of machines in our cluster. We've got
web boxes, which are pretty lightweight. We've got storage class
machines, which as you can guess have big drives and medium speed
processors. And we have database class machines, which have fast
processors, fast disk, and lots of ECC memory.

Fast disk, in general, means some form of SCSI. The database machines
use Ultra SCSI drives, specifically Seagate Cheetah Ultra320s in a
RAID configuration. Unfortunately, we've experienced something like a
40% failure rate on these drives. Because of the RAIDs, this hasn't
resulted in any loss of data or downtime, but it's still extremely
unacceptable.

The drives have a 5 year warranty, so we've been shipping them back to
Seagate. In return, we receive 'repaired' drives from Seagate.
Recently, one of those repaired drives failed within one minute when
installed in a machine. My suspicion is that part of the problem is
that Seagate isn't doing much of a job to fix drives that are sent
back for repair.

Speaking of which, when sending a drive back to Seagate for
replacement, you can call them up and ask for the 'advance replacement
option'. This means that they send out a 'new' drive before they
receive your old drive. This speeds up the replacement process. Before
today, we were able to get a customer support rep on the phone
directly and specify the advance replacement option immediately. But
now, apparently Seagate is outsourcing their first-tier customer
support, so now when you call them up, they ask for your details and
then say someone will be in touch within 24 hours. Which, if calling
on a Friday, probably means Monday.

We'll never purchase Seagate Ultra SCSI drives again. The risk is too
high.

Posted by markf at September 24, 2004 09:12 AM
 
I've had a Maxtor hard disk for several years now, and it's working
perfectly. It's not loud, it's fast, and I'm happy so far. Anyone else??
=Pete
Click to expand...


Wouldn't it be better to add this to the existing thread?
 
I've had a Maxtor hard disk for several years now, and it's working
perfectly. It's not loud, it's fast, and I'm happy so far. Anyone else??
=Pete
Click to expand...



It's like everything else. You only hear the bad news. The only maxtor I
have I bought in 99. It's still running, but it's required a low level
format to fix a bad sector multiplication problem. It's doing fine now.

But every other drive I buy from now on will be seagate. You just can't
beat that 5 year warranty.
 
Timothy said:
I had a Maxtor drive under daily start-up and use for 4
years before I retired it as an archive and switched to
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9s. I've had those for more than
a year, now, with no problems. Perhaps their longevity
is related to their cooling. The original was mounted
vertically in front of the air entering the case (a Dell
design), but the new ones are mounted both vertically and
horizontally and are past their one year warranty with no
problems - noise or otherwise.
Click to expand...

Maxtors have six tiny 8-pin chips that run very hot and probably move
the heads and motor, and apparently a lot of the electronic failures
are due to them. In an old Maxtor 6800 (7200 RPM), they measured 68C
in 24C surrounding air when the drive was horizontal (lots of air space
around it), 53C when the drive was vertical.
 
larry moe 'n curly said:
Maxtors have six tiny 8-pin chips that run very hot and probably move
the heads and motor, and apparently a lot of the electronic failures
are due to them. In an old Maxtor 6800 (7200 RPM), they measured 68C
in 24C surrounding air when the drive was horizontal (lots of air
space
around it), 53C when the drive was vertical.
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, how did you measure the temperatures. I suppose
one could just hold the bulb of an old fashioned thermometer on them
but I can imagine there is some high device for doing it.

BTW, just to keep the thread on topic, I've had Maxtors running on three
different machines for over five years with no problems.

Thanks.
 
Just out of curiosity, how did you measure the temperatures. I suppose
one could just hold the bulb of an old fashioned thermometer on them
but I can imagine there is some high device for doing it.

BTW, just to keep the thread on topic, I've had Maxtors running on three
different machines for over five years with no problems.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Theres SMART monitoring software that reports some sort of temp
reading from the hard drive. Not sure what. And I did see and posted
about my Maxtor climbing super high when it did certain things ----
like quickpar etc. However other brands also got very hot and I put
fans on all my drives and have spaces inbetween them --- maybe thats
why Im not having problems or maybe its another reason. Who knows.

Hard drives do get hot though.

The other curious thing is if you look through threads people claim
their seagates are hotter than other brands, WDs are hotter than other
brands and of course Maxtors so who knows. Maybe some lines of Maxtors
do run a bit hotter than others and thats whats causing the problems.
 
Got 4 80 mm fans and 7 fans inside my case in total. If my 2(20gb and 15gb
5400rpm) maxtor drivers fail cause of heat, i think someone at maxtor will
need to get fired.

the drive in my first pc(66mhz 486, 16mb of ram) was maxtor 1gb, it failed
after a trans-atlantic flight(long story). I still believe in them as a
brand, but this failure rate "thing" makes WD raptors look enticing to say
the least.
 
This is one of the first intelligent answers I have read to a question
like this. No individual can make an informed (intelligent) answer to a
question like this. I have built around 50 computers and used 3 brands of
HD's and have only had one HD failure and it was a WD. That would not at all
though make me say no more WD they must be crap. My sampling is just not of
a high enough number to be of any significance.
To make an informed opinion you need to have used thousands of each
brand and model and very few people fall into this category. What I would
love to see is a company like NewEggs return rates. That would be a
meaningful figure. I would love to see a chart from NewEgg, a company I am
sure sells tens of thousands of HDs a month, that shows how many of each
different HD they had sold and what percentage of each had been returned
with a defective claim. That would be something to base a buying decision
on.
The opinion of people that have used very small numbers is meaningless
as they are all going to bad ones from time to time. You just have to have
very large numbers to give meaningful answers to questions like this

Joe
 
Just out of curiosity, how did you measure the temperatures. I suppose
one could just hold the bulb of an old fashioned thermometer on them
but I can imagine there is some high device for doing it.

BTW, just to keep the thread on topic, I've had Maxtors running on three
different machines for over five years with no problems.

Thanks.
Click to expand...
Here is what smartctl hs to say.

smartctl -a /dev/hda

Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
Revision Number: 16
Attribute Flag Value Worst Threshold Raw Value
( 1)Raw Read Error Rate 0x000b 200 200 051 0
( 3)Spin Up Time 0x0007 150 146 021 3008
( 4)Start Stop Count 0x0032 100 100 040 79
( 5)Reallocated Sector Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 0
( 7)Seek Error Rate 0x000b 100 253 051 0
( 9)Power On Hours 0x0032 097 097 000 2644
( 10)Spin Retry Count 0x0013 100 253 051 0
( 11)Calibration Retry Count 0x0013 100 253 051 0
( 12)Power Cycle Count 0x0032 100 100 000 78
(194)Temperature 0x0022 126 253 000 24
(196)Reallocated Event Count 0x0032 200 200 000 0
(197)Current Pending Sector 0x0012 200 200 000 0
(198)Offline Uncorrectable 0x0012 200 200 000 0
(199)UDMA CRC Error Count 0x000a 200 253 000 0
(200)Unknown Attribute 0x0009 200 155 051 0
SMART Error Log:
SMART Error Logging Version: 1
No Errors Logged
 
Pete said:
I've had a Maxtor hard disk for several years now, and it's working
perfectly. It's not loud, it's fast, and I'm happy so far. Anyone
else?? =Pete
Click to expand...

I'm happy, so far. Much more so than I was with my IBM 'Deathstars'. =:-/

Of course it's pretty much impossible to get an accurate picture of failure
patterns via usenet - all the 'evidence' is anecdotal. It may well be that
recent Maxtor drives have a higher failure rate than normal, but by how
much?

Is there anyone here that works for a large retailer that sells a wide range
of drives and can provide meaningful statistics of drives sold and drives
returned?
 
/mel/ said:
I'm happy, so far. Much more so than I was with my IBM 'Deathstars'. =:-/

Of course it's pretty much impossible to get an accurate picture of failure
patterns via usenet - all the 'evidence' is anecdotal. It may well be that
recent Maxtor drives have a higher failure rate than normal, but by how
much?

Is there anyone here that works for a large retailer that sells a wide range
of drives and can provide meaningful statistics of drives sold and drives
returned?
Click to expand...
I think on these newsgroups you mainly hear about failures. That's only
natural. That's why I started this thread.
=Pete
 
Pete said:
I think on these newsgroups you mainly hear about failures. That's
only natural. That's why I started this thread.
=Pete
Click to expand...


That's a good point, Pete, and not necessarily a bad thing.
In "Maxtor hard drives fail too soon", I spoke of four Maxtor harddrives
failing within the first week of use. This observation alone doesn't mean
much, however, if a goodly number of other posters say something similar,
collectively, we might be on to something.

The newsgroups gave at least anecdotal reports about the IBM Deathstar,
Fujitsu xxx harddrives, and bad motherboard caps. Later all three were
confirmed to be widespread issues.

That's my 2 bits.
 
S.Heenan said:
That's a good point, Pete, and not necessarily a bad thing.
In "Maxtor hard drives fail too soon", I spoke of four Maxtor harddrives
failing within the first week of use. This observation alone doesn't mean
much, however, if a goodly number of other posters say something similar,
collectively, we might be on to something.

The newsgroups gave at least anecdotal reports about the IBM Deathstar,
Fujitsu xxx harddrives, and bad motherboard caps. Later all three were
confirmed to be widespread issues.

That's my 2 bits.
Click to expand...
thanks.
=Pete
 
I've used Maxtor, Seagate, Control Data, and other types of hard drives. I
have had very little failures in any of them. I have some in some older
computers that are in their 6th year. These machines are left on 24/7, and
only the hard drive sleeps if there is no activity for 30 minutes. The
servers however never have their drives stop.

What I did find, is that if I install a lot of fans in these computers, and
have a lot of cool air movement, I get fewer failures. I once had one
machine's mother board fail after 7 years of operation. I managed to find
another used one, and it was back in operation within several hours. Some of
these machines are being used for simple tasks, such as running an Ethernet
router, or as a printer server, and serial port server. They are not running
applications that require state of the art operations.

--

Jerry G.
======


I've had a Maxtor hard disk for several years now, and it's working
perfectly. It's not loud, it's fast, and I'm happy so far. Anyone else??
=Pete
 
Another from a website though these are about SCSI seagates :

Seagate Has A Problem

At Bloglines, we have 3 classes of machines in our cluster. We've got
web boxes, which are pretty lightweight. We've got storage class
machines, which as you can guess have big drives and medium speed
processors. And we have database class machines, which have fast
processors, fast disk, and lots of ECC memory.

Fast disk, in general, means some form of SCSI. The database machines
use Ultra SCSI drives, specifically Seagate Cheetah Ultra320s in a
RAID configuration. Unfortunately, we've experienced something like a
40% failure rate on these drives. Because of the RAIDs, this hasn't
resulted in any loss of data or downtime, but it's still extremely
unacceptable.

The drives have a 5 year warranty, so we've been shipping them back to
Seagate. In return, we receive 'repaired' drives from Seagate.
Recently, one of those repaired drives failed within one minute when
installed in a machine. My suspicion is that part of the problem is
that Seagate isn't doing much of a job to fix drives that are sent
back for repair.

Speaking of which, when sending a drive back to Seagate for
replacement, you can call them up and ask for the 'advance replacement
option'. This means that they send out a 'new' drive before they
receive your old drive. This speeds up the replacement process. Before
today, we were able to get a customer support rep on the phone
directly and specify the advance replacement option immediately. But
now, apparently Seagate is outsourcing their first-tier customer
support, so now when you call them up, they ask for your details and
then say someone will be in touch within 24 hours. Which, if calling
on a Friday, probably means Monday.

We'll never purchase Seagate Ultra SCSI drives again. The risk is too
high.

Posted by markf at September 24, 2004 09:12 AM
Click to expand...

Heres another Seagate horror thread just to kick it in :

Check out these reviews of the 300 gig external Seagates at Amazon you
rarely see this level of bashing

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...54299-4782464?v=glance&s=electronics&n=507846

Does that make me not want a seagate? Not really. Ive heard many
others say the internal ones are OK but they clearly have big problems
too with some batches.
 
Heres another Seagate horror thread just to kick it in :

Check out these reviews of the 300 gig external Seagates at Amazon you
rarely see this level of bashing

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...54299-4782464?v=glance&s=electronics&n=507846

Does that make me not want a seagate? Not really. Ive heard many
others say the internal ones are OK but they clearly have big problems
too with some batches.
Click to expand...
I wasn't aware of this problem. About three weeks ago I bought a
Seagate 300GB internal drive from Fry's to replace a 200GB Seagate.
After installing it I copied about 160GB of data from the 200GB drive
to the 300Gb drive without problem. The 300GB drive worked fine for
about four days when it started having write problems. I replaced it
with a Maxtor 200GB drive that Staples had on sale. I had no problem
copying about 170GB of data from the 300GB Seagate to the Maxtor
drive, which has been running fine for about two weeks now.
 
I wasn't aware of this problem. About three weeks ago I bought a
Seagate 300GB internal drive from Fry's to replace a 200GB Seagate.
After installing it I copied about 160GB of data from the 200GB drive
to the 300Gb drive without problem. The 300GB drive worked fine for
about four days when it started having write problems. I replaced it
with a Maxtor 200GB drive that Staples had on sale. I had no problem
copying about 170GB of data from the 300GB Seagate to the Maxtor
drive, which has been running fine for about two weeks now.
Click to expand...

Yeah they have the same type of reviews for the 400 gig. I guess if
your experience is common than Seagate must be having the kind of
reliability record that Maxtor bashers claim Maxtor has for the
whole 300 and 400 gig series. A catastrophic failure rate. The funny
thing is no ones writing about it like they are with Maxtor. And some
of the reviewers are claiming they get too hot.

Its also funny cause I actually just bought a Seagate at a sale on
Friday as a "backup" but this is the 160 gig one - I pray there isnt
some hidden catrastrophic record of these drives which will burst into
public view. Anyway I was really pleasantly surprised that this one
does have a 5 year warranty . Some of the other Seagates sold at
Compusa recently were listed with a 1 year warranty like the Maxtors
and WDs on sale.
 
Back
Top