OcUK Please stop selling Maxtor HDD's

You are right, all drive manufacturers have a bad patch at some time or other, and most of the Maxtors dying now were probably made a couple of years ago. You won't know if the HD you buy today will expire early because that will be ~12months from now. I've just (last night) RMA'd my 75Gig Raptor which suffered a controller failure. It was manufactured in '03 and been running less than 2 years in one of my PCs, but I wouldn't say Raptor's are crap on the basis of that - it's the luck of the draw.
 
I have built and repaired a large number of PCs over the years and I have to say that Maxtor drives have been the least reliable

A few years ago large number of IBM Deskstars failed. I used them in a large number of builds and every one has failed and every replacement has failed. Hitachi is said to be a huge amount better and bare no relation to the dreadful old IBM drives though

I wouldn't ever touch a Maxtor drive at the moment. A large PC manufacturer used to use Western Digital but changed for some reason to Maxtor (we have a large number of these at work). Every Maxtor has failed bar one and we're just waiting for it to go. We bought a server and they shipped it with Maxtor drives! Needless to say these were immediately removed, given away with a warning on reliability and replaced with Seagate drives

I haven't had a single Seagate fail. I've had one or two Western Digital drives fail but these tend to be reliable

All of this experience BTW is in IDE and SATA drives though, not SCSI
 
div0 said:
Ok put it this way - take that SAME group (you and your friends) and ask:

"during that same period how many OTHER manufacturers drives could we have had fail?"

For example: If between you and your friends - you all had 20 maxtors and 2 seagates during that 2 year period - then what is the chance that you'll see a maxtor fail in comparison to a seagate?

I'm not saying that anyone should expect to see that many hard drives fail in such a short period of time - BUT the more drives you have belonging to one manufacturer, then the more chance you'll have of seeing one of their drives fail!!
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I've had seagate drives in the past and found them to be reliable. On my old P2 I had a 6.4gb seagate cheatah that lsted me 6 years. All that happened to that eventually were a couple of small bad clusters, that I isolated without incident and continued to use the drive!
 
I think each manufacturer goes through a dodgy spell. IBM/Deathstar (I had a Deathstar and it never died on me :) ), Seagate when through a troubled time and now it's Maxtor's turn. Smids has hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned. Also to mention the incompatibility between certain DM10 models and NF4 chipset hasn't helped. All drives will fail at some point but Maxtors every so often seem to drop like flies. Having said that, I do have a 200GB DM10 and it's been as solid as a rock! (touchwood!). Not sure what the MaxLine III are like - I'd like to think they are similar to the SCSI line since they are enterprise drives but not sure.
 
i had a maxtor d540x 80gb and that's still going in my friends xbox. I've never had a maxtor die, but i have had a WD 160gb go down on me. However, i wont try to deny that maxtor seem to be having far more than their fair share of problems lately.
 
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I had a Maxtor 120 die after 18months heavy usage. I should have known as it slowed slightly and got a bit noisier. I left it and lost everything. Serves me right for being lazy.
Wanting minimal downtime i ran to a local shop purchased another maxtor an 80 and slung it in.
Do i blame maxtor for wearing out in 18months of heavy heavy use. No.
When it come to getting another i considered how the old one had been and how much the new one would cost. For nowt. Bought it slung it in get on with it.
For the price this was and for the amount i use it i expect another 18months and i will Not be as lazy next time when it starts getting noisy.
I sometimes wonder where some of these horror stories come from and if they are really valied.

A friend of mine once told me You can never trust anything anyone ever tells you as you don't know there source for the information they are spurting out.
I mean they could have just read it in some crap mag and are just blurting that out.

In my experience maxtor drives are fairly priced and go beyond there warrantys. If this one dies early then i will have my own horror story to relate but until then i am happy to buy maxtor.


I should add i wonder how many Maxtor drives are out there percentage wise and whether this effects the numbers of borked ones compared to other brands.
Anyone know ?
 
all of the above may be true, but i have used only maxtors until about a year ago when i started using Spinpoints for noise, and can honestly say i've only ever had 2 go faulty (out about 30).

And of these 2 one was RMA'd promptly and efficiently.

But as i say, i now either buy raptors or spinpoints.
 
I have a Maxtor 80Gb drive on death's door at the moment. Less than 12 months old. I shant be buying another.

My data is too important to me to bother with cheap drives any more :(
 
Monstermunch said:
As the title really............

I'm totally fed up with Maxtors, they're crap. I've replaced 13 in the last year now and it's getting to be beyond the joke. Everytime I get a phone call from a friend or family member asbout their PC's not booting etc, I get there and what do I find but a "maxtor" HDD inside the case, either not working at all or creating major problems. :mad: :mad: :mad:

Rant over!
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totally agree..... 3 drives dead in 1 year here.....
 
I had a 40gb and a 80gb fail, but had a 160gb for 2 years which never failed. I used to work part time in a local pc shop and we didnt sell their drives. The build quality is shocking imo they r also the noisyest drives out there and probably the slowest.
 
Used quite a few Maxtors over the years and not a single problem. Current drive is a Maxtor Maxline III 250GB SATA stuffed in a toasty Shuttle case.

Every HD manufacturer has gone through a period where a particular model has severe reliability problems.

I remember years ago Western Digital having a nightmare with a particular model that kept failing, The IBM Deskstar 60GXP failure rates, Seagate and now it looks like Maxtor.
 
Dutch Guy said:
I agree, I had two Maxtors in my computer since 2001/2002 and they worked perfectly.
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got a 20 gig maxtor here that cost me about £80 when it was new, must have been about 7-8 years ago now, still going strong!
 
ive a 9 yr old Maxtor 6.4GB still going strong :p

a 250gb maxtor in my HTPC, another in my desktop, and 3 120gb WD SATAs in my desktop in RAID0 :)

had spinpoints in the past, they didnt fail, and had a Quantum 2gb, which failed recently (testing installs) unsurprisingly... 11 yrs on lol
 
jellybeard999 said:
ive a 9 yr old Maxtor 6.4GB still going strong :p

a 250gb maxtor in my HTPC, another in my desktop, and 3 120gb WD SATAs in my desktop in RAID0 :)

had spinpoints in the past, they didnt fail, and had a Quantum 2gb, which failed recently (testing installs) unsurprisingly... 11 yrs on lol
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VeNT said:
got a 20 gig maxtor here that cost me about £80 when it was new, must have been about 7-8 years ago now, still going strong!
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the problem with maxtor isnt there OLD drives (i have a 11year old maxtor still working!!)

its there new ones
 
Well i've got 4 maxtors in my current pc and no probs yet (oldest is nearly 2yrs) and 2 Hitachi, one of the hitachi was replaced erlier this year and was less than 12 month old.
last year i replaced 2 160gb maxtors from 2 different pc's, same model etc both were just over a year old and personally i think they knew they were dodgy cos when i checked the warranty they only had 12months!? rotten gits.

The most annoying i've ever had was a pair of Western Digitals, bleedin horrible whiney racket they made, almost worse than Deathstars when they got the C.O.D but the wd's were still working.
 
I run

3x one touch II 300gb usb2 ext maxtors (18 months old)
2x 120GB int maxtors IDE (about 3 years old)
1x 300GB int maxtor sata (7 months old)
1x 200GB int maxtor sata (8 months old)
1x 150Gb raptor sata (6 weeks old)

Plus an 80gb IDE maxtor in the shuttle i built for my parents.(2 years old)

And no problems with any of them..

(But had two 120gb IBM IDE drives fail on me. :( )
 
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