Poll: Poll: What was your first Hard Drive Failure?

What was your first Hard Drive Failure?

  • Maxtor

    Votes: 212 38.4%
  • Seagate

    Votes: 55 10.0%
  • Hitachi

    Votes: 14 2.5%
  • IBM

    Votes: 127 23.0%
  • Western Digital

    Votes: 73 13.2%
  • Fujitsu-Siemens

    Votes: 22 4.0%
  • Samsung

    Votes: 24 4.3%
  • Other - Please state

    Votes: 25 4.5%

  • Total voters
    552
Make: Maxtor
Model: SATA. Diamond Max10, 300Gb
Dead on Arrival: No.

Reason: After 4 month the HDD started making very, very loud crunching noises. RMAd the sucker then sold it. Now I wont touch Maxtor 'cos I lost about 200gigs of Pics (all my holiday pics :(), Music (which I infact paid for so it taught me to back up all my info!), games and all the school info too. I was so angry you wouldn't believe!
 
120Gbyte Maxtor DiamondMax 9 IDE. Failed after about 3 months. Can't actually remember where it came from. I bought 2 from different sources. Used in Raid 0 on an nForce 3 board. Just had a couple of windows lock-ups and then it failed to re-start. That's the danger of Raid 0 I guess. The drive was replaced, they sent me a 160!
 
120GB IBM Deskstar - wasnt right for a good long time (you could hear the head reset at random every now and again).
Not stopped me buying Hitachi Deskstar - they really are a very different disk :)
Currently have a Maxtor 200GB Sata thats starting to show the odd SMART error :(
 
Mercutio said:
120GB IBM Deskstar - wasnt right for a good long time (you could hear the head reset at random every now and again).
Not stopped me buying Hitachi Deskstar - they really are a very different disk :)
Currently have a Maxtor 200GB Sata thats starting to show the odd SMART error :(
You see it was for this reason I separated IBM from Hitachi. And look at Hitachi's results!!!
 
smids said:
You see it was for this reason I separated IBM from Hitachi. And look at Hitachi's results!!!
And you are surprised?!? ;) If you ignore the models that actually had the fault IBM wouldnt be doing too badly at all either...

Im just glad Ive never recommended Maxtor - the poll results arent actually scientifically accurate or significant, but make you think...

ps3ud0 :cool:
 
But tbh, 3 out of 240. I now have 4x80GB hitachi sata-II's in RAID0+1 - looked like the best drives to get. My Seagate is my storage drive to complement that, but with RAID0+1, not sure if you need it. I do in fact have 2 travelstars (IBM) and 1 Travelstar (Hitachi) and they are all good. I know IBM had problems with the dodgy models but they really ought to have seen it in testing. I don't doubt IBM though, as I own an IBM Thinkpad T41 and the build quality is amazing. All their products are good and built well but I would have expected more from them with those model lines in terms of testing etc.

About the poll, I didn't make it to be scientific, just user input that people who are buying drives at the moment could see. I'm glad I did it now, as it does make you think about your next drive.
 
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smids said:
About the poll, I didn't make it to be scientific, just user input that people who are buying drives at the moment could see. I'm glad I did it now, as it does make you think about your next drive.
I just wanted to point out to some people that always advise that its near on impossible to validate reliability through your own experience (still a valid point) - this poll cant counteract such a stance but still give a qualitative rather than quantitative statement over what could be the better hard drives to get presently...

ps3ud0 :cool:
 
First failure was a 540mb Western Digital drive that came in a prebuilt P60 machine back in the mid 90s.

Since then I've had a 20 gig Seagate and a 120 gig Maxtor fail.

Currently running 5 hard disks in my rig (40, 120, 160, 250 and 250 gigs). These are all Maxtors and the 40 and 120 are years old and still going strong.
 
ps3ud0 said:
Im just glad Ive never recommended Maxtor - the poll results arent actually scientifically accurate or significant, but make you think...

ps3ud0 :cool:

Or it could be maxtor sell twice as many drives in which case they aren't actually too bad (purely specualtive, I have no idea about sales figures). Maxtors have a bad rep on this forum but on other forums people really praise them.
 
PeterNem said:
Or it could be maxtor sell twice as many drives in which case they aren't actually too bad (purely specualtive, I have no idea about sales figures). Maxtors have a bad rep on this forum but on other forums people really praise them.
I think actually that Seagate have been around the longest and are actually one of the largest manufacturer's around - they even recently bought Maxtor (last month). So compare Seagate with Maxtor and Maxtor are still poor quality.
 
Two IBM 120GB 7200rpm harddrives..Can't remember model numbers..

Some the pins were you plug the ide in swap off from there soldered joints on both my IBM drives.Never had it happen on any of my maxtor drives.
 
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I have had 2 maxtor diamondmax plus9's that failed conseculatively. That did put me off them although I do still have another 60gb maxtor plus9 which chugs away in an external caddy but it too has a fault, whereby it sometimes spins up and thats about it..

Still works most of the time and has for over 3yrs.

I do know people however who have nothing but good things to say about Maxtor. My friend has an 80gb drive (dont know model) which runs smooth and quietly. My dad also has 17 dell PC's at his workplace which have these drives and all have been fine.
 
When Dell moved from Western Digital to Maxtor we seriously considered taking our business elsewhere due to Maxtor's dubious reliability

We replaced all of the Maxtor hard drives in the server though - this is far too important to trust to unreliable discs. Maxtors are also noisy and they pride themselves on making quiet PCs
 
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