If you're buying a new Hard Drive or own a Maxtor...

[Kryten]

AVOID maxtor like the plague. If you have one already, make sure you have everything backed up regularly and keep your fingers crossed.

For some reason, the drives are dropping like flies - regardless of age. In the past 3 months I've had circa 50 PC failures to deal with, both from businesses and private home users. Around 30 were down to software abuse such as viral activity, porn infested computers and spyware. The other 20 however were ALL due to Maxtor failures.

For some reason, the drives are developing electrical and mechanical problems which manifests itself at first causing errors in Windows - file system read errors, booting errors and what not. Whereas some folks would probably write that off as a bad sector - the problem continues when the PC soon stops booting Windows at all. Safe mode, command, recovery mode, nothing.

Checks on all of these drives on different computers using Maxtor's own Powermax software confirms hardware failure pertaining to the electrics and/or mechanics in the drive. Maxtor have thankfully been very good with their RMA process and have too confirmed issue with the drives I have returned to them.

I've had the same failure on drives from 30gb IDE to 300gb SATA units.
It would only seem prudent to warn you of this issue just in case it prompts you to do a backup and possibly saving you the loss of your files.

But in case it does happen and the drive is semi usable (such as the windows not booting problem) use a Linux LiveDVD/CD with NTFS capability - the way Linux reads your files and indexes differs from Windows and doesnt stress the drive quite so much - in return you will probably and hopefully be able to rescue anything you need from the drive to another media source.


I know some folks will probably point out the failures could be something else such as one hell of a virus, physical abuse or what not, but I don't personally know. It's too many failures for me to pass off as a "slight issue" and these drives have been used from once a week to check an email to used constantly to serve important database information on a 24/7 basis.

Either way, please heed this warning and regardless of your drive manufacturer - keep backups

I'm looking into this a bit more myself as I'm now very interested in why these failures have started cropping up so quickly. A quick search on Google also shows this isn't uncommon - but then again you could use the search criteria on any drive make and have the same amount of results come up. I dont know what the catalyst is for these problems to manifest like they have, but if anyone else has information that may help, I'd like to know.

Maxtor ARE being very helpful but they don't seem to want to admit there is a large scale problem. 20 issues in 3 months for me alone is a big problem. There are other people round here fixing PC's too - so how many is that in a small town in a small timescale...

 

[RandomBastard]

I've never liked Maxtor anyway, even healthy drives make funny clicking noises.
I stick with Western Digital Caviar SEs or Seagate barracudas.

 

[KevinUK]

/me wubs my Maxtors

I've had 1 die on me but who hasnt had a drive die

 

[Kryten]

Just keep it backed up. Same goes for any make of drive, but double for these...

 

[Penguin]

Only ever heard bad things about them tbh. Two friends have had maxtor drives fail, my brothers maxtor died and mine has been on the way out for some time! (Had to reinstall windows a few times, i'm not a techie expert but sounds like a HD problem as files became corrupt etc.) I keep my important stuff backed up though.

Luckily i should be upgrading soon -- Barracuda will be my next drive hopefully.

 

[inactionman]

Lots of people buy them though as they are competitively priced, that's why you hear about lots of them dying. In my experience they are all as bad as the other, which I why I tend to buy the more reliable lines (Maxline for Maxtor, etc.).

 

[JingleBells]

My 40GB Maxtor died last month with no warning, all my downloads gone

 

[Utini]

Had plenty of maxtors die in the work machines too, and we cant even send them back because of whats on them, thanks maxtor. Bag'o'shite they are. If i had a choice it'd be seagate every time.

 

[Yaka]

how times have changed not long ago peeps were are maxtor fan bois

 

[tris-]

/me wubs my Maxtors

I've had 1 die on me but who hasnt had a drive die

the last time i got a dead HDD was on my packard bell 486.

bad sectors made my mother cry

 

[TheJkWhoSaysNi]

I'm probably tempting fate here but...

I have a 160gb maxtor which I've had for 3 years. I am continually writing/deleting large amounts of data to/from the drive (We're talking 10-20gb TV series torrents here). The drive has easily had over 1tb of different data on it and it's still working flawlessly.

Maybe i'm just lucky.

 

[MYstIC G]

No, it'll die eventually.

I've run plenty of Maxtors into the ground over the years, but since they keep letting me RMA them all (i.e. RMA the original drive, then every replacement that follows without question) I don't much care when they die because they're never irrecoverable.

 

[strangely brown]

I guess I've been lucky then - I have 2 Maxtor 60Gb drives raided (stripe only) at home - These are now over 5 years old and have been perfectly reliable. If they were to break down now, I guess I can't complain too much as I've certainly had my money's worth out of them.

It is an interesting point Kryts makes about Windows thrashing disks a lot more than other OSes - I've certainly noticed this as well. When I was trying the Windows Vista RC, I couldn't get over the amount of disk thrashing that was taking place for no good reason.

Given the way disk usage has increased, I'll bet we'll see a lot more instances of disk failures over the next couple of years - My guess is that manufacturers will only guarantee them for a couple of years now - And what was a couple of years' worth of disk usage on Win2K/WinXP is now probably more like 18 months with Vista...

Regards,
SB

 

[Kryten]

I'd agree with SB on that - and have since done a little research into it.

As I said before, Windows indexes and searches for files in a different manner to Linux - something that hasn't changed much since the good old days of MSDos 3.3. I'm certainly no expert on file systems and the differences between NTFS, EXT3 etc etc but it's certainly good to know Linux acts as a lovely data recovery tool in these instances

The Maxtor drive I've had RMA'd and replaced is getting noisier by the day - I've been running powermax on it every 5 or so days just to see if theres any developments, but nada. Might just be "wearing in". I have been hammering it on purpose - at the moment it's home to my Vista installation, which i've just shifted from the main drive (my sata WD drive).

A couple of years ago, there was a large spat where nearly all hdd manufacturers reduced their warranties on new drives to a year - previously many of them had lifetime or 10 year warranties on. I know typically now they're only on about 3 years - but it'd not suprise me to see this lowered again until manufacturers iron out these issues.