Maxtor, are their hard drives any good???

[marcfell27]

I looking at buying an external hard drive and maxtor seem to be the best value for money.

A mate of mine has one (100gb USB) and has had lots of problems with it. He has warned me away from buying Maxtor ever. Do his concerns have any foundation???

 

[SNGX1275]

Maxtor is just as reliable as anyone else.

Do they die? Yes.
Do they die earlier than others? I doubt it.

 

[Nodsu]

As SNGX said, the drive inside the enclosure has about the same odds for survival as any other (that is: it may die tomorrow and it may die some time in 2030). The enclosure itself is another matter - only god knows how good the USB-(S)ATA chip in there is.

Just google for that specific enclusure/chip and see if people are having many problems.

 

[Ural_]

Maxtor is a good and popular hard drive brand, but if you still feel uncomfortable getting it then western digital and seagate are as good and same price range too.

 

[marcfell27]

Thanks for the advice,

Did a google and found a few issues with the Maxtor, but as has been advised I'd probably find the same amount of issues with any drive.

This is a recent announcement:
"Planet3DNow! said Maxtor has issued firmware to fix problems with Nvidia chipsets which could experience data corruption. The site said that the firmware applies to the Diamondmax 10 and 11, the Maxline III and the Maxline Pro 500."
http://www.planet3dnow.de/cgi-bin/newspub/viewnews.cgi?id=1139354296
(pity the site is in German, another skill I don't have)

My mate has a nvidia chipset, maybe I've sorted his problem out.

The more I look the worse it seems. Maybe I should just bite the bullet, pay the cash and start posting when it all goes wrong. (not optimistic)

 

[Nodsu]

You are researching the wrong thing.

You want an external hard drive and as I said before, the actual enclosure and chip used are important, not the hard drive inside the enclosure. Whatever you find when you search for "Maxtor" will probably give you stuff about their hard drives and is irrelevant.

What you need to find out, is the enclosure Maxtor uses (probably some generic chinese crap) and people's experiences with it.

 

[DelJo63]

You are researching the wrong thing. You want an external hard drive

fyi:
The sole difference internal vs external is the enclosure with a power supply.
Any internal IDE or SCSI can be placed in an enclosure and you get an external HD.

I use to purchase only Quantum drives as they had high MFTB and low bad block counts,
but they were bought-out by Seagate. As IBM ships with Wester Digital, give that
some strong consideration.

 

[Didou]

I use to purchase only Quantum drives as they had high MFTB and low bad block counts,
but they were bought-out by Seagate.

Quantum has been bought by Maxtor, Maxtor itself being bought off by Seagate not so long ago. Not quite the same thing.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

But it's significant that since IBM sold their harddisk business to Hitachi, they don't USE Hitachi disks anymore. Since their DeathStar debacle, IBM must have grown wise on their own (or now Hitachi's) drives!
JoBeard brings a strong argument there for WD.
Personally, I just love the Seagate Barracuda.

 

[Nodsu]

fyi:
The sole difference internal vs external is the enclosure with a power supply.
Any internal IDE or SCSI can be placed in an enclosure and you get an external HD.

Exactly! The drive inside the enclosure is irrelevant. Your system sees a USB mass storge device presented by a bridge chip. Any glitches the hard drive may have with SATA speeds with some chipsets etc etc are irrelevant. Whether the ATA-USB chip is 100% USB or ATA compliant or how well the power supply of the enclosure is built is most relevant.

I've got an USB IDE enclosure here that makes hard drives emit smoke and wouldn't recognise any hard drives An identical device cannot handle hot-plugging.
My advice: keep away from stuff using the ALi M5621 chip..

 

[Apollo65]

Have any one had problems with Fantom drives?

I am looking at getting a Fantom titatium 300gig exteranal hard drive. Has anyone had problems with a Fantom drive? Was unable to find any info on the fantom case as has been stated above to be important. Also is there that much differnt between 5400 and 7200 rpm drives?
Thanks in advance for your help

 

[Apollo65]

INITIO Bridge Chip

After further searching and calling I found out that the Fantom drive/micronet use the INITIO bridge chip for their USB 2.0 300 gig titanium External Hard drives. Has anyone had any issues with this type of bridge chip in their external hard drives? Thanks again for your help.

 

[Nodsu]

I don't think these forums have enough user base to answer such questions. Try Google instead.

 

[P!M]

I looking at buying an external hard drive and maxtor seem to be the best value for money.

A mate of mine has one (100gb USB) and has had lots of problems with it. He has warned me away from buying Maxtor ever. Do his concerns have any foundation???

I have a maxtor 80GB for almost 2 years and never a single problem

 

[Apollo65]

Thanks Nodsu.
Have not found anything more then the usual problems with external HDD. I went ahead and bought the Fantom/Micronet HDD. Will see how it goes.

 

[Samstoned]

and here I have been running a gen USB and (IDE)never one little byte of error
all drives under 200gb as a side note

 

[DelJo63]

and here I have been running a gen USB and (IDE)never one little byte of error all drives under 200gb as a side note

Although MTBF averages 5yrs, I've got a Quantum HD from '86 with
zero defective blocks and it STILL delivers data :angel: