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156 Comments
- andygravity, on 10/12/2007, -9/+153SEXTOR drives: bigger, harder, faster.
- Neilyos, on 10/12/2007, -8/+52I feel bad for your customers.
- AMCer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+26At my office, I pretty much bought only Maxtor drives up until about 1-2years ago when EVERY SINGLE ONE (their DiamondMax) started to fail. I have HAD to replace EVERY SINGLE MAXTOR! I now buy only Seagate because of their 5 year warranty. So far, not one has failed either.
Maxtor Suxorz! - inigomntoya, on 10/12/2007, -2/+24Maxtor is pretty popular among home users. But where I work, we only buy Seagate because of their support and warranty.
- ericnmu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18Nice! Seagates have long been my favorite. The 5 year warranty is nice.
- mrtrick, on 10/12/2007, -3/+19[sarcasm]
The question is... did Seagate mail in their rebate form?
[/sarcasm]
Da dunk... ching. Thank you... I"ll be here all night. - asdfer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14Then, Quantum was acquired by Maxtor.
Now, Maxtor is being acquired by Seagate.
It's like Highlander story..... There can be only one.
Place your bets...... Who's gonna acquire who next. Western Digital, Seagate? - megaloid, on 10/12/2007, -4/+18Your friend is safe. Gorillas are herbivores.
- dark_helmet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13From what I have observed, maxtor are more popular with consumers; however seagate are much more popular with servers. Personaly, I prefer seagate hard drives and I hope that this will help the resultant company make even better storage devices.
- mfratt, on 10/12/2007, -8/+20Seagate the underdog? A friend's Maxtor drive (300GB) shattered, penetrated the metal casing, and ruined his system. And thats not the only failure story ive heard. Hopefully Seagate will slap some quality into the Maxtor drives. Ill still stick with Western Digital myself though.
- mikeazorin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Yarrgh, this is not great for consumers. What will probably come out of this are drives that are modestly better, but more expensive.
- jwolf, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11The real question is: Will new Maxtors come with 5 year warranties?
- PRESS_00, on 10/12/2007, -9/+18Weird, I though Seagate was the underdog here. Heck, we only sell Maxtor internal hard drives at the computer store I work at...
- xelpmoc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7beejay54: Hitachi? Samsung? Fujitsu?
MattL920: LaCie only makes the enclosure, I believe. - winampman2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8@staan and everyone whos had multiple harddrives die
A lot of your harddrive failures come from bad computer setups... its not the harddrive's fault. A bad power supply can easily kill a harddrive with weird voltage spikes and other crap.
No matter what harddrive you guys put in your computer, it will die, and you'll keep cursing the harddrive companies. Check out other parts of your computer though... multiple harddrives dying in one machine usually means something is wrong with the machine. - Verikon, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12Isn't this way old news? I remember hearing about this like 6 months ago. Is it only being confirmed now?
- master_of_fm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9I was a bench tech for 4 years and over that time for reliabilty starting with the highest overall it has always gone
1. Western Digital
2. Seagate
3. Maxtor
4. Hitachi (previously IBM)
but there are always examples where a particular line or model fail more than others, like a year after the first SATA drives came out, you didnt dare setup a RAID array with Seagate drives that were made in China, Malaysia or Thailand were okay, but not China. that problem only lasted a couple of months and then they were fine. - JohnboiWaltune, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Hopefully Seagate will gather up all the unsold Maxtors, load them into a rocket, and shoot them into the sun.
- rewritable, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6hey staan, did you dip all those hard drives in acid while you were using them?
I have never had a hdd fail on me. I have a 7 year old MAxtor, 4 year old maxtor, 5 year old seagate, 4 year old western digital and a 1 year old western digital. All are spread out in 3 pc's and get used every day. - Tobey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6All the stories about Seagate planning to aquire Maxtor for the past year didn't clue you in?
- samdu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6"the installation software stunk,"
You shouldn't need any installation software to install a hard drive. Even an SATA. All you need are drivers for the controller. And if you're installing XP SP2, you don't even need those. - rewritable, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9"maxtor is well known to die after 13 months"
Then why is the one I have in my media center pc 4 years old and still working? - kimos, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7@PRESS_00: Twice I've RMA-ed Western Digital hard drives. Their warrany service is amazing. They keep the serial numbers on file, so I don't need a bill or anything and I can bypass the retailer all together. If you give them a CC number, they'll send you a new drive first, and you can return the broken one after.
So yes. The HD warranties are nice and people use them...
And no, windows XP doesn't keep your disk less fragmented. Fragmentation had to do with how much data you store and move (regardless of OS) and your filesystem of choice (though MS doesn't usually give you much of a 'choice'). - kimos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5They'll likely not make many changes. Dual brand them, Maxtor for retail and personal users and Seagate for commercial customers, and leave most of the product details the same. They'll just cut overhead costs, perhaps merge some plants, and eliminate some of the competition.
Odds are low that you'll see "SEXTOR" brand hard drives now in the place of Maxtor and Seagate. Brand names are powerful. Regardless of who is right or wrong, look at how many people on this thread alone have a strong opinion and attachment to a certain brand of drive. - beejay54, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Crazy, so what does that leave us with? Western Digital and Seagate? While this limits choices a little bit for the consumer I actually think this will be good, the patents held by hard drive manufacturers have made it difficult for them to compete with one another and grow their products, maybe we'll see some wicked products out of this merger down the road.
- dark_helmet, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5It was just finalized yesterday: http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,3184,00.html
- willhoy, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9get your head out of your ass, i have almost a TB in seagate SATAs
- Tobey, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Yeah, I had a 2 month old 300GB Maxline lll go out on me (bad sectors), and Maxtor sent me out a replacment drive three days later.
Great customer support, lousy drives... - tekmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Hopefully, Seagate's acquisition will make Maxtor drives more reliable. And an extension of Seagate's 5-year hard drive warranty to Maxtor drives would be even nicer.
- staan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5It has been my experience that, quite simply, consumer HDDs all have terrible quality. Go for the one with the best warranty, and keep backups.
In ~18 months, I had the following drives fail:
- 40gb Maxtor. Older drive, so I replaced it with...
- 160gb Western Digital. Lasted about 9 months before failing. I got it warranty replaced, and while waiting for the replacement, bought...
- 200gb Seagate. Lasted approx. 4 months before failing. While I got it replaced, I switched back to...
- The RMA'd 160gb WD. Lasted around six months, then failed.
The system had been running with the RMA'd 200gb Seagate for around a year when I got rid of it. - underburn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Yeah ive had several bad experiences with maxtors.
- dark_helmet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba. theres probably more but thats all that comes to mind off the top of my head
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Twice I've RMA-ed Western Digital hard drives. Their warrany service is amazing"
Maxtor's is identical. I've RMA'd both maxtors and WDs.
I've been through the whole "maxtor versus WD" argument, and honestly, there's no winner.
Half of everyone on the net tells the "All the maxtors I buy die on me" story, while the other half says "all the WDs I buy die on me!"
As far as I can tell, it's just chance. They're equally (un)reliable.
At any rate, HD warantees are a VERY GOOD THING. Like I said, I've RMA'd both. Of course, by the time 3 years has elapsed, you're looking at 2 cycles of moore's law -- you can get a drive the same as yours for 1/4 the original price you paid, or 4 times as large for the same price. But if and when you have a drive fail on you around the 1 year mark, the RMA process is a godsend - rvalles, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I'm suffering the opposite. I've seen three seagates break up early (after little more than a year of use), while no maxtor has failed.
The seagates might have more warranty but it does matter very little; there are privacy concerns that simply make it impossible to send the HDs for repair/replacement. Also, they don't recover your data, so you need to do so on your own... if you need to do it in a way that implies opening the hard disk, you screw your warranty. - daeken, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3re: noGoodNamesLeft
"The IBM Deskstars (AKA Deathstar) didn't have that great a reputation either, though I'm not sure that this has changed now that Hitachi own most of the operation."
I've had a 25% failure rate within 1 month of use with 500GB Hitachis Deathstars. - esansone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3yeah, I have had bad Maxtor drives.
But I have also had bad Seagate and WD drives...
every manufacurer produces bad drives. It's hard to determine that a certain company produces lower quality drives than another (in terms of failure rate). You'd have to get hundreds of drives and run them all in the same testing configurations (heat, usage, transportation/handling).
a 5 year warranty would be good though. - aluminumpork, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Holy crap drives like to die on you guys. Samsung drives have never failed me. I had a 6GB Samsung drive for 6 years. I thought it finally died when my friend accidentally dropped it on a linoleum floor. It took a beating, but to my surprise, I put it in my computer and booted 98. No problems. Since then I've never had a Maxtor fail (3 years of straight use). The only drive series I've ever had problems with was Caviar, I hated those drives. Anyways, I've never played with Seagate drives, and never have had problems with Maxtor, but I'm sure this merge will be fine.
- noGoodNamesLeft, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6@mrfatt; I thought Western Digital were supposedly one of the less reliable brands. Guess that proves that every brand has people that like it and people that have had bad experiences. It's not like I've ever had a bad experience with the old Western Digital in my P-233 setup...
On the other hand, there are companies like Fujitsu whose products I wouldn't touch with a bargepole after they deliberately lied to consumers about faults in their drives...
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,113054,00.asp
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/10/31/fujitsu_faces_lawsuits_over_hdd/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/22/fujitsu_hdd_fiasco_to_end/
The IBM Deskstars (AKA Deathstar) didn't have that great a reputation either, though I'm not sure that this has changed now that Hitachi own most of the operation.
At any rate, your friend's exploding Maxtor is certainly one of the less impressive stories I've heard associated with the brand (to put it mildly); though it also has a certain "cool!" factor about it. - meegosh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2How did you manage to do that? Shave the corners off the edges of the power connector? If it was the IDE cable that would be another story, even then you wouldn't have fried it.
- noGoodNamesLeft, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Flash memory is unsuitable for running current operating systems as they stand due to the (relatively) low number of total read/writes it will tolerate compared to a standard HDD. The problem is with areas that get repeated reuse within a relatively short period of time.
Of course, I'm sure it's possible (with Linux at least, and theoretically Windows) to use a file system that takes the problem into account, but I doubt it's trivial - liquidoc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Hitachi buys Seagate FTW
- iheartcrack, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It was announced a while ago. This story is about the shareholders giving final approval.
- meegosh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I've been a tech since July of '05 and I have noticed a similar pattern to yours. Except for us it seems to be (best quality first)
1.) Seagate
2.) Western Digital
3.) Maxtor
4.) Hitachi/IBM -- Travelstar and Deskstar
5.) Quantum Fireballs
Let me tally what data recoveries I have running at the shop now..
IBM - 2 (2.5" and a 3.5")
Samsung - 1 (3.5")
Maxtor - 2 (3.5")
Hitachi Deskstar - 2 (both came out of a 1TB raid setup 500x2) (3.5")
I should keep a running tally somewhere, it would be interesting to see which comes out on top as far as quality is concerned. - everfalling, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2http://www.google.com/trends?q=maxtor problems%2C seagate problems&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all
that might give you some clue, but i donno how accurate it is using those phrases (manually typing in each phrase and looking at the page count shows that 'maxtor problems' = 1,950,000 while 'seagate problems' = 3,490,000. So i donno if there's any real way to quantify it).
i always thought seagate sucked. i guess it depends on the individual drive, not an entire brand. - TheSpook, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Hitachi = old IBM deathstars. Fujitsu/Samsung = good bang for the buck for what I needed it for, but the performance wasn't business worthy. Seagates are king, probably followed by WD. (I have never used a Toshiba drive - don't they make satellites?)
- student69, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3This has been my experience as well.
1. Western Digital
2. Seagate
3. Maxtor
4. Hitachi - 4degrees, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2kind of old news really, this whole process started back in nov or dec 2005. Of course its old news to me, since a buddy of mine workd over at maxtor, and i remember seeing a story about the buy out on slashdot a while back.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/21/1311235
as for the maxtor bashing, i still have a 40MB maxtor drive from my old 386 dx2-25 and the baby still works! i have never had a maxtor drive fail on me, other then the couple i have dropped(dont ask) I have had segates and western dig fail hard core on me before mostly clicky click head crashes. - Tobey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Quantum Fireballs were pretty reliable for me. I had a 1GB run for 10 years without a problem. The only reason it died was becuase I umm... plugged the power connector in backwards while the system was hot...
RIP ol' betsy... - mblaser, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Maybe I'm just really lucky with Maxtors, but I've been building systems for myself/friends/family for about 7 or 8 years, and in that time I've used about 15 Maxtor drives. All of them are all still working. Out of the 6 or 7 WD's I've used, none are still working. Out of the 3 Seagates I've had, none are still working. Hrmm..
- steger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2just use a third party defragmenter and you will have less HD failures for the most part.
-
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