Re: a Maxtor story

[Ben Potter <bpotter@teamsearchmr.co.uk>]

Unfortunately it is not just the 120Gb Maxtor hard drives - over a 
period of about 12 months I bought 22 Maxtor hard drives, of these 14 
have now failed. Almost exactly the same problem as markus, In my case, 
extreme slowdown - followed by sudden failure.

The majority of these disks were the slimline models (never again!), but 
there was at least one normal(?) sized hard drive. The capacity ranged 
from 30 Gb to 120Gb

Needless to say, after replacing the lot with IBM deskstars, I have not 
had a single disk failure (to date) and will not be buying Maxtor disks 
again.

Thankfully, I also have a highly paranoid backup system - and did not 
lose any data, and am now running the smart daemon tools on all the 
critical machines.

Just my 2 pence
Ben Potter

markus reichelt wrote:

>I've had nothing but trouble with Maxtor's Diamond Plus series. A few
>months ago I bought 3 120Gig drives and set up a linux box which
>worked like a charm. One day I noticed that a partition located
>within the 30-40% of cylinders of one drive was giving bad data read
>results, about 1-2 MB/s[1]. So I ran a full fsck which took a long
>time but worked out fine. Over time, the other drives showed exactly
>the same symptoms.
>
>Since areas where bad data read results appeared were spreading I
>first used the smart daemon tools to check if the drives were
>failing. I haven't got the logs anymore but it was suggested to run a
>full diagnostic. So I did with Maxtor's PowerMAX utility.
>
>In the end no data was lost (due to a paranoid backup strategy) and
>all Maxtor drives were replaced by WD ones. For me, buying Maxtor
>drives is considered A Bad Thing.
>  
>