I opened my Mac Pro and was disappointed...

It's the thread from beyond the grave!!! ;-P

I'd have to say that a VERY vague rule of thumb is: *ANYTHING* but Maxtor should be fine (should).

What people tend to forget, in their enthusiastic rush to post, is that it's humans making the hardware, not magic powers. You only ever hear the moans and the groans, on the whole - noone posts back an update saying: "Well chaps, it's 3 months since I bought my Seagate, and I just thought I'd tell you all it's going good, in case you care".

You may get the odd one or two that do this, compared to the copy/paste moaners, who seem to be forever perched on the edge of their keyboards, just ACHING to moan and deride every conceivable product that company "X" makes, just because they read somewhere that a sprinkling of people, bought the duff ones that "X" company made. A good majority of these posts you read from the whiners, are copied and pasted from forum to forum, giving the illusion that there appears to be a LOT more people complaining than is actually true; some people just enjoy a good whinge, and jump on the bandwagon for kicks - pathetic.

Use some common sense people - if we listened (and took in) every single hardware sob story, we'd never buy ANYTHING!. Use your own judgement, and buy what works for you; if you get a duff one from the batch, that doesn't mean that they're ALL gonna be duff ones.

I have had bad products - I don't moan and whine and analyse, I simply return and swap out. If the fault/QA issue persists time and again with said brand, and same said item, THEN I'd mark that brand or product line as "suspect".

Don't buy Maxtor!. This is the only hard disk warning I can give you - do so at your peril (yes, they really ARE that bad - all of them).

In the months since this thread should have died, my Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor drives are all doing just fine, and have been doing so for years. Hmm, I wonder what we should make of that...

Kash said:

In the months since this thread should have died, my Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor drives are all doing just fine, and have been doing so for years. Hmm, I wonder what we should make of that...

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Oh I wonder... hmm Kash, hmmm. You expect them to die within *months*?. You're hardly the optimist are you, and you have proved not a thing, by this absurd remark. I can only assume that you expect the drives to die when YOU say so, otherwise you can sit back and type comments about how everyone else is wrong, causing you to feel awfully self righteous?.

Please - use a little intelligence, no offence.

glosswhite said:

... you can sit back and type comments about how everyone else is wrong, causing you to feel awfully self righteous?.

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Hello Pot.... Hey! It's the kettle... just wanted to tell you... You're black!

Please - use a little intelligence, no offence.

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Some times it's best to take your OWN advice.

I'm a hypocrite, but then again I am human, and I don't deny that for a second . Some of us admit it, and some prefer to show off with clever replies. I admit I am an idiot at times, but make no apologies for not being perfect - it is futile to try to be.

Maxtor drives in the past have had a bad history of dying. I have had some that lasted for 10 years, but again and again I have seen and heard of a lot of issues with Maxtors. That might be different now that Seagate owns them but only time will tell.

But... nothing in more recent history equals the IBM Deskstar 60GXP and especially the 75GXP. The 75's were dropping like files. At that time most people on Anandtech forums who purchased them had the same issues. Most did not even last a year. There was a Class action law suite against IBM over the 75GXP and rightly so. But IBM sold their Hard drive division to Hitachi and now I hear their drives are very good to excellent. The IBM issue is very well documented. I had a few die on me also not to mention on the systems I repair.

BUT, times change and hard drives change. WD has had some bad drives way back in the day and I have seen a few old Seagate's that had issues but that was a long time ago. I do agree things have improved a LOT with Hard Drives over the years. I hope the newer Maxtor's hold up better now that Seagate owns them. Only time will tell in the end.

EDIT: Kash, I had a RARE 74GB Raptor that died. Called WD and they had me ship it back and sent me a brand new 74GB Raptor. This was over a year after purchase! I was very impressed!

glosswhite said:

Oh I wonder... hmm Kash, hmmm. You expect them to die within *months*?. You're hardly the optimist are you, and you have proved not a thing, by this absurd remark. I can only assume that you expect the drives to die when YOU say so, otherwise you can sit back and type comments about how everyone else is wrong, causing you to feel awfully self righteous?.

Please - use a little intelligence, no offence.

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You're right, I apologize. I should have been more specific. My two Western Digital Raptors have been sitting in my computer for about 3 years now. The other Western Digital drive has been chugging along for about 4-5 years. One of my Seagate drives has been sitting in my system for about 3 years. I have a Maxtor that I pulled from a machine which has been running for close to a year now. And my latest addition is a 500GB Seagate. Granted, I've only had it for a couple of weeks now, but I'm pretty confident it'll hold up as well as my other drives.

Oh, and I have some ancient drives doing pretty well in older rigs. I have a Seagate drive that I bought in 2000 and a Western Digital drive that I got in 2001, both doing just fine.

So you're right, I wasn't using my intellect properly. My drives are much older than "a couple of months"

dtravis7 said:

Maxtor drives in the past have had a bad history of dying. I have had some that lasted for 10 years, but again and again I have seen and heard of a lot of issues with Maxtors. That might be different now that Seagate owns them but only time will tell.

But... nothing in more recent history equals the IBM Deskstar 60GXP and especially the 75GXP. The 75's were dropping like files. At that time most people on Anandtech forums who purchased them had the same issues. Most did not even last a year. There was a Class action law suite against IBM over the 75GXP and rightly so. But IBM sold their Hard drive division to Hitachi and now I hear their drives are very good to excellent. The IBM issue is very well documented. I had a few die on me also not to mention on the systems I repair.

BUT, times change and hard drives change. WD has had some bad drives way back in the day and I have seen a few old Seagate's that had issues but that was a long time ago. I do agree things have improved a LOT with Hard Drives over the years. I hope the newer Maxtor's hold up better now that Seagate owns them. Only time will tell in the end.

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If a company continues to produce trash, for the sake of "value products", then their reputation is deservedly in tatters, and it will be a long slow struggle to reverse such a reputation, but that is their fault.

glosswhite said:

I'm a hypocrite, but then again I am human, and I don't deny that for a second . Some of us admit it, and some prefer to show off with clever replies. I admit I am an idiot at times, but make no apologies for not being perfect - it is futile to try to be.

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Wow - can I quote you on that?

cwa107 said:

Wow - can I quote you on that?

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Yeah - why not! looks like u have already, hehe.

For all the people that hate Maxtors, I've used them almost exclusively for years... I've got 1 250, 2 200s, 9 160s, 3 80s and 2 60s at the moment, the oldest of which is going on 6 years old. I've put another 10 or so in other people's systems. I've never had one fail, and the SMART status of all of mine is fine (not sure about the ones in other people's systems, I don't check the SMART status of my parents/grandparents drives).

Geeky1 said:

For all the people that hate Maxtors, I've used them almost exclusively for years... I've got 1 250, 2 200s, 9 160s, 3 80s and 2 60s at the moment, the oldest of which is going on 6 years old. I've put another 10 or so in other people's systems. I've never had one fail, and the SMART status of all of mine is fine (not sure about the ones in other people's systems, I don't check the SMART status of my parents/grandparents drives).

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I have Maxtors that are in older Dell Optiplex GX1s that have been running for 7-8 years without issues. Then again, I've seen certain series of Maxtor drives (most notably the low profile 3.5" series) that fail within months.

I used to buy IBM drives almost exclusively, even after the notorious failure of the 75GXP series. Even after Hitachi bought them out, I bought one of the original 7200 rpm notebook drives, the 7K60. But out of the notebook drives I see fail, the 20-40GB Hitachi Travelstars seem to be the worst (so bad, in fact, that at work we refer to them as "Deathstars").

Seagates circa 1999-2004 or so, had some of the highest failure rates I've ever seen. Then, all of the sudden, they got better and started extending their warranty.

Western Digital drives, in the late 90s were awful (the "Caviar" series, in particular). We used to pray that Dell would replace them with Maxtors when we called them in under warranty. But then, I have a Western Digital 160GB in my desktop PC that has been running trouble free for 3 years now.

So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that all of the major manufacturers seem to have their "bad runs" of drives that are unreliable. I don't think it's limited to one particular manufacturer, so in my opinion, it's best to go with the one that has the longest warranty (which happens to be Seagate at the moment), which is why you'll see me recommending them whenever the question is asked.

Samsung and Toshiba drives are another story - they are complete and utter trash. I wouldn't put any data I value on either one.

Kash said:

Actually, Maxtor's quality should be going up as well since Seagate bought them a while back.

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They just bought the line, didn't really change anything

we had half of our 500 maxtor drives fail at work.

I like hitachi myself, they are high quality and competitively priced. I have been using them for a few years almost exclusively for system builds for myself and others. So far I have not had any problems. Of course I have not had any problems out of any of my Seagate or WD drives either. Heck I even have a 4 year old maxtor running in a "guest" machine downstairs. Yes I have a separate computer for guests, no one, not even my wife, touches my MacPro!

The thing is, it seems not all HDs perform quite the same, even if the seek times and RPMs are the same. I always thought Seagate was top of the line. That illusion was blown apart when I got my Mac Pro, and cloned my main drive (Western Digital) to the secondary Seagate, and the clone boots WAY slower than the WD drive. I'm now a WD convert. (unless I'm missing something and there's some technical reason a SuperDuper clone will take 3x slower to boot than the original..but that doesn't seem to make any sense)

One manufacturer is not necessarily always superior to another; it varies from model to model and firmware revision to firmware revision. And similarly spec'd drives are typically going to be relatively similar, in my experience.

Maxtor bad!

It's a sad situation, when people are more interested in proving a point on a forum, than facing up to the facts. It amuses me how maths and reasoning from a neutral perspective, are tossed out of the window, in favour of "smart" comments and the lack of foresight that would otherwise have made it obvious, that just because your 10 or so drives are working ok, that you use this reasoning to assume that the hundreds of millions of OTHER drives Maxtor/whoever produced, will also never fail on their owners, because YOURS didn't.

The drives don't have personalities; they don't think "oh I better behave, because my owner is giving me a good write-up on mac-forums, and I had better not let my side down" - you are just fortunate, but STILL you are an extremely insignificant sub-fraction of the total consumer market for hard disks/<insert product here>

I wouldn't like to guess how many hard drives exist, save to say that the 20, 20 or even 100 drives you may happen to own, are still only a VERY small and proportionally insignificant percentage of the total number, mass produced by "X" company, overall. Possibly in the order of 0.001%? (I dunno, just a guess!.)

Oh my - this is SUCH a boring subject - I shall exit this thread, and wish you all well.

glosswhite said:

It's a sad situation, when people are more interested in proving a point on a forum, than facing up to the facts. It amuses me how maths and reasoning from a neutral perspective, are tossed out of the window, in favour of "smart" comments and the lack of foresight that would otherwise have made it obvious, that just because your 10 or so drives are working ok, then you use this reasoning to assume that the hundreds of millions of OTHER drives Maxtor/whoever produced, will also never fail on their owners, because YOURS didn't.

The drives don't have personalities; they don't think "oh I better behave, because my owner is giving me a good write-up on mac-forums, and I had better not let my side down" - you are just fortunate, but STILL you are an extremely insignificant sub-fraction of the total consumer market for hard disks/<insert product here>

I wouldn't like to guess how many hard drives exist, save to say that the 20, 20 or even 100 drives you may happen to own, are still only a VERY small and proportionally insignificant percentage of the total number, mass produced by "X" company, overall. Possibly in the order of 0.001%? (I dunno, just a guess!.)

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Lol.... Doesn't that same argument work in reverse... against you and your statements?