Dare I get a Maxtor, now that Seagate owns them?

[Vinny]

Maxtor drives are usually a bit cheaper than most other companies but their quality is what bothered me in the past.

But now that Seagate owns them, are they any better? I heard that most Maxtors are just rebaged Seagates now.

 

[Syntonic]

Well, most people have had problems with the later lower end Maxtor drives. Early drives didn't have problems and the other Maxtor solutions were fairly good (Atlas line.) Even though my 320gb Maxtor Maxline 3 (entry level ES) crapped out on me, it wasn't the fault of the hard drive and I'd easily have recommended it for the price that was charged in the past. I'm currently in the process of getting an RMA for it but there are some minor things I need to get out of the way beforehand (since my drive is no longer made, it'll be replaced by another drive and I'd like to know -exactly- what first.)

My 40gb Maxtor HD still performs great but that's not really applicable right now but thought I'd add that in. I have nothing against Maxtor personally and people are beginning to complain about the Seagate 7200.10 line to give you an idea how things work. If you are looking into Maxtor's low end drives, then I don't really know if they are any better but judging from the complaints from a few about the 7200.10s, it may be that Maxtor brought down the Seagate line in terms of quality and nothing has changed. As a disclaimer, in my own personal experience, my 7200.10 runs great and is quiet and my 7200.9s are also running just fine.

 

[WizardOZ]

I have used Seagate, WD, Maxtor, Quantum, Connor, Fuji and IBM brands of hard drives. All have worked beautifully and all have died. There have been periods where each manufacturer has had bad runs and then one hears comments along the lines of "avoid this brand - they are junk". And so it goes.

Hard drives are a mechanical device, and sooner or later they fail. Overclocking a system may increase the possibility of premature failure due to everything being pushed past design limits. But this is just one more factor to consider. Maxtor made some extremely good product.

 

[Vinny]

Good point, I noticed that most people swear never to buy some company's product again because they've had bad luck with one item.

I think I'm going to go ahead and get that Maxtor drive. It's $150 for 500GB, 16MB cache, and SATA2. It's made for servers or something but I'll only being using it to store some DivX/XviD video files so speed isn't such a big deal.

 

[MarkG]

If I remember correctly, Maxtor's server drives have a much longer warranty than the low-end drives too.

I've had eight or ten Maxtor drives in the last decade and the only one that died was about six years old; even then it just started getting disk errors so I was able to copy all the files over to a new disk except for a couple that had unrecoverable errors.

 

[Vinny]

Yeah, the newer ones have a 5 year warranty like Seagates.

But I guess all this doesn't matter since I went with a MyBook 500GB. It was only $149 so I figured that I'm basically paying for a external USB2 enclosure for $9 more.

Too bad WD kills your warranty if you open it. Funnily enough, the drive inside has a 5 year warranty whereas they only give you a 1 year warranty on MyBook externals.

 

[watsontcbc]

I have always bought Maxtor drives whenever I had a choice. I have an old 40GB drive that I bought and installed in an HP PC. It migrated into a Sony PC when the HP got too tired, and it's now in a CompUSA hard drive case serving the iTunes storage role for my Mac Mini. I've had this drive and used it daily for at least 10 years. Flawless performance and reliability. Maxtor all the way. If Seagate makes them even better, well, that's amazing - I don't know how they could be any better. (I'd always heard Seagates were crap, but the earlier commenter is probably right - drive batches vary; I must have just heard of the bad experiences).