i wanna know

[glockjs]

why not just get a seagate or samsung thats fast AND quiet?

[stiltman]

I only use Seagate now (last 3 years)

[ViRaL1]

I've never had Seagate myself, but with 400GBs going for $280, I might consider picking up a few. :P

[Soopafresh]

Saw a barely two week old SATA Maxtor 80GB with the clicking sound happening Had a 250GB WD drive dump, took a whole weekend to pull off most of the data.

At work I've got a pile of WD 10GB, 20GB, and 40GBs, Plus a Few 120s that are paperweights. At least WD is pretty cool for putting the manufactured date on the drive. If the drive is over 3 years old, I won't use it for anything important.

The drives which still work years later are the IBM 180GB IDEs, and the Seagate SCSIs, even though the SCSIs are hot to the touch.

One thing for certain, if the data is important to you, you're taking a big risk if you don't copy the stuff to a second location.

[mrtristan]

Same thing happened to me, but the "tech" on the phone had no idea what he was talking about. My drive was so dead, it wouldn't even show during the POST. I couldn't see it in the BIOS, either. It was 100% fried.

I called Maxtor to get an RMA. The guy on the phone told me to run their diagnositic tools, then call back with the error code. I told him that the drive was completely dead. He told me again to download their PowerMax tools and run the tests. Then, I explained to him that the drive wasn't even being recognized by the motherboard, so I couldn't run the diagnostics. Again, he advised me to run the stupid PowerMax diagnostics. For the third time, I told him that it would not work, because my computer couldn't even see the drive. This time, I told him that I had already run the diagnostics, but they didn't work, because the drive was no longer visible to the system. I almost couldn't believe my ears. He then proceeded to ask me what version of the software I was using, then advised me to update, run them again and call back, because I was using a previous version. For the fourth time, I explained very carefully that the drive was completely dead. It did not spin up, make noise, or produce any heat. The system could not see the drive during the POST, or in the BIOS setup utility. My second drive, I explained was running fine and the utilities worked with that one. Finally, he gave me the damn RMA and told me that he'll let me slide this time, but be sure to run the diagnostics before calling in the future. I was extremely irritated, but I got my fricken RMA, so I was satisfied.

The replacement drive was a 40Gig instead of the 30Gig that I sent in, so at least I made out in that sense. Other than my collection of mp3's.

i would suggest you use a hard drive cooler for large hds. i use a vantec hd cooler for my maxtor 200 gb sata hd. i've only had 1 maxtor ide 200gb that had begun to fail. i was lucky that i could save the data i had on there before the hd actually died. use the maxtor utility to test the drive out which is what i did. the reason i suspected something was wrong with the drive is it would not DEFRAG at all. i called maxtor and they told me to download their utility and put it on a floppy disc. maxtor told me a error code will appear if the hd is failing and sure enough it did. the replacement drive they sent was a 250gb hd which made me a happy camper.

maxtor and western digital ok. everyone has their own brands and opinions. on another computer forum site i read how a guy has a seagate hd failing. every brand will have their flaws. i still have a old 20gb 7200rpm maxtor hd that runs great..

[gmatov]

mrtristan,

I think you are wrong, there. You gave a tech grief because you could not see the drive in your POST or BIOS.

If you had been less of a know it all, you would have DL'd and run the MUD, Maxtor Utility Diagnostic, and as soon as you selected the drive in the DOS program, you would have gotten an error code, most likely E03. Had you done that you would have gotten a cheerful "Send it back, we'll send you another, and if you want to cross ship, just give us a CC number, I'll send it out right now, and you have 30 days to try to salvage your data.", or words to that effect.

MUD asks the electronics what's wrong, it doesn''t examine the disks. Generally there is nothing wrong with the drive itself, just the control module. And chances are, it will be tested and a new module installed and sent to the next warranty claimant.

Mechanically, they are rather reliable, considering the use they are put to. I'd like to see your car go through the same grind. Replacing it every 3 months.

Cheers,

George

[mrtristan]

George,

I wasn't trying to be a know it all. The first thing I did was check Maxtor's website for their return/warranty procedure. Before I called, I put the disk with the Maxtor utilities in my floppy drive and tried to run the diagnostics. I read that you need to run the utilities and get an error code before calling Maxtor's warranty line. (This was the disk that came with the drive.) The broken drive didn't show up. The working drive showed up and checked out okay. Maybe that's why he advised me to update to the newer version, maybe I was running the wrong set of utilities, but at that point I was irritated. I'm sure he was irritated at me as well, but I wasn't an ass about it. I never am. In fact, I get pretty nervous on the phone sometimes, so I probably did a bad job of explaining myself. I don't know a lot of technical terms, so the best explanation I could offer was telling him that the drive "went kaput."

[SIRCOOKS]

it looks like i better hurry up and get my 2x250 gb hds seagate then, honestly, if im stupid for buying maxtor or western digital drives, but since ive been fixing computers for a whuile thats wnhat usually buy and recomend, butill hurry nad try to save my data, also, how good are these sea gate drives in a usb 2.0 enclosure, i ask this because the maxtors were no good, in there, thats why i had to put them back in my main case