- Joined
- Dec 22, 2003
- Messages
- 3,351
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...
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...