Need advise on choosing Maxtors

  • Thread starter Thread starter Davis Rorgh
  • Start date Start date
Chris said:
They spin quiet, but mine makes quite noticeable noise when accessing.
Click to expand...

I don't think there is any hard and fast rules on noise or reliability. My
Maxtors are quiet all the time, one replaced a Seagate that had a
high-pitched whine, but other Seagate drives have been quiet too.

Adam S
 
Maxtor's have a recent history in the industry of being very prone to
failure, and are having a high return rate. I would recommend WD.
Click to expand...

Just an anecdote on this: we have two terabyte disk servers (3ware
cards, IDE-RAID, Maxtor disks). The older server has 8 Maxtor 120GB
(6Y120P0) disks in it and has behaved flawlessly. The newer one has 8
Maxtor 160GB (6Y160P0) disks in it (but otherwise identical hardware),
and over the last six months 5 of them (all from the same batch) have
failed. I suspect that their quality control is patchy, so most of the
disks they sell are fine but if you get several disks from the same
batch then you are running the risk of having them all die together :(.
 
Every Maxtor I or my friends have had in the last 5 years has lasted
less than 2 years. Our impression - from experience, is that they are
utter junk.
 
Davis Rorgh said:
I use XP on my home system. I use only parallel IDE. For hard
drives I tend to use Samsungs and Barracudas because I don't want a
lot of heat or noise.

I'm tempted to try a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB (8MB and fluid
bearings) model 6Y160P0. http://snipurl.com/9dxv

From what I have read this Maxtor sounds like a nice hard drive with
good enough performance to perhaps replace my Barracuda IV system
drive.

Is this model of Maxtor reasonably quiet and reasonably cool?

Models seem to change so much that if I don't read the reviews for a
specific model then I find I can not always infer what it will be
like from reviews of other models in the manufacturer's range.

I think the Maxtor and is supposed to be commendably quiet. Can
anyone confirm this.

I've also heard that this Maxtor came with either three 60GB
platters, three 68GB platters or two 80GB platters. How can I tell
which is which from looking at the case?
Click to expand...

This months PC Plus has a comparative test of a whole bunch of sata & pata
drives.
They seem to come out favouring Deathstars though :-(
Maybe the recent moans about them were unfounded
(I mean recent, since the label got swapped from IBM to Hitachi)

jim.
 
(e-mail address removed) top posted:
The new DiamondMax 10 line should feature 16MB buffer on Parallel ATA models too, if I'm not wrong.
Click to expand...

Well, there's gotta be a first time for everything, geno. You being
not wrong, I mean...
 
never tried it, i only have 98 and 2000 and don't want to switch to XP. i
doubt it would work any it's a fairly old DOS based CAD program, couple
thousand to upgrade that.
 
Every Maxtor I or my friends have had in the last 5 years has lasted
less than 2 years. Our impression - from experience, is that they are
utter junk.
Click to expand...

Most folks do NOT confirm that.
 
jim. said:
This months PC Plus has a comparative test of a whole bunch of sata & pata
drives.
They seem to come out favouring Deathstars though :-(
Maybe the recent moans about them were unfounded
(I mean recent, since the label got swapped from IBM to Hitachi)
Click to expand...

Most of the "moans" were about the 75GXP series, that preceded the Hitachi
deal. Although the 7K250s do occasionally meow.
 
Wooducoodu said:
never tried it, i only have 98 and 2000 and don't want to switch to XP. i
doubt it would work any it's a fairly old DOS based CAD program, couple
thousand to upgrade that.
Click to expand...

Have you tried it on VirtualPC? If it's old enough that it won't run under
2K or XP then even with the virtualization performance hit it may run
adequately on modern hardware. IIRC Microsoft has a 45-day time-bombed
demo available for download.
 
Odie makes his living dealing with broken drives, so he knows more
about it than most of us. Odie's information isn't complete of course:
It could be that the subset of people who use data recovery services
use Samsungs and Maxtors more than average, or it could be that
Seagate buyers are more likely to have proper backups (and thus don't
have as much need for data recovery), or...
Click to expand...

In other words, his sample is self-selecting (and not
adjusted for the amount of product sold by each vendor).

Biggest killer of drives is heat, improperly cooled
drives will die a lot faster (and some makes are more
prone to heat failure then others... Maxtor being one of
them in my experience).
 
Just an anecdote on this: we have two terabyte disk servers (3ware
cards, IDE-RAID, Maxtor disks). The older server has 8 Maxtor 120GB
(6Y120P0) disks in it and has behaved flawlessly. The newer one has 8
Maxtor 160GB (6Y160P0) disks in it (but otherwise identical hardware),
and over the last six months 5 of them (all from the same batch) have
failed. I suspect that their quality control is patchy, so most of the
disks they sell are fine but if you get several disks from the same
batch then you are running the risk of having them all die together :(.
Click to expand...

Hence the old rule of thumb about building a RAID array
using drives from multiple vendors (or at least not all
ordered on the same day from the same vendor).
 
Toshi1873 said:
In other words, his sample is self-selecting (and not
adjusted for the amount of product sold by each vendor).
Click to expand...


I'm afraid there's no other way.

None of the manufacturers I have spoken to (Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung)
has the slightest intention of passing on their failure rates. They are
all distinctly unforthcoming.

I would imagine Seagate sell an awful lot of drives, and the fact that I
very rarely get one in (ok, so I got 2 in during the past 2 days, but
overall I see very few of them) tells me they are reasonably reliable.

Odie
(Sig left in for the benefit of Folkert.)
 
you can run it under Virtual PC (or VmWare, but it user to be a bit more
expensive) in Win2K.
 
Every Maxtor I or my friends have had in the last 5 years has lasted
less than 2 years. Our impression - from experience, is that they are
utter junk.
Click to expand...

I stopped buying Maxtors after a couple of them failed on my
within six or eight months, after light use. I switched to Western
Digital. Maybe better, maybe not better, but at least it isn't Maxtor.
 
Toshi1873 said:
Biggest killer of drives is heat, improperly cooled drives will die a
lot faster (and some makes are more prone to heat failure then others...
Maxtor being one of them in my experience).
Click to expand...

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.
 
Hence the old rule of thumb about building a RAID array
using drives from multiple vendors (or at least not all
ordered on the same day from the same vendor).
Click to expand...

Yup, I know this rule now. I didn't then :).
 
Toshi1873 said:
(e-mail address removed) says... [drive reliability]
Odie makes his living dealing with broken drives, so he knows more
about it than most of us. Odie's information isn't complete of course:
It could be that the subset of people who use data recovery services
use Samsungs and Maxtors more than average, or it could be that
Seagate buyers are more likely to have proper backups (and thus don't
have as much need for data recovery), or...
Click to expand...

In other words, his sample is self-selecting (and not
adjusted for the amount of product sold by each vendor).
Click to expand...

Yup. Not self-selecting in the worst possible way (like phone-in
polls), but there are certainly biases we simply don't have the data
to correct for. Flawed as the data is there it's not like we can go to
the Maxtor or Seagate sites and find out exactly what we want to know.
Odie's observations, even with their statistical flaws, I find more
valuable than Mr. Joe Average who hates $DRIVE_MANUFACTURER because
they had two drives fail in the space of a year.
Biggest killer of drives is heat, improperly cooled
drives will die a lot faster (and some makes are more
prone to heat failure then others... Maxtor being one of
them in my experience).
Click to expand...

Agreed. Last time I looked Maxtor specified a max temp of 55C with
most others 60C.


Tim
 
I stopped buying Maxtors after a couple of them failed on my
within six or eight months, after light use. I switched to Western
Digital. Maybe better, maybe not better, but at least it isn't Maxtor.
Click to expand...

I stopped buying seagate for the same reason."Go Figure" as the
colonials say ;-)
Find a hard drive make that does not let,"You" down and stick to
it.It's a Zen thing :P



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DaveW said:
Maxtor's have a recent history in the industry of being very prone to
failure, and are having a high return rate. I would recommend WD.
Click to expand...

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