Thanks, Spot. I'll check out the IBM's, I hadn't thought of them. I think I will stay away from the Maxtors.

You are right that all of these drive manufacturers have their issues from time to time. I just learned a painful lesson when my internal WD crashed (sent it out for data recovery but it was unsuccessful) and that is what is driving me to add more storage.

By the way I got your book for Christmas and am really looking forward to digging into it once I get all my storage issues straightened out.

I have a 60 gig USB2 from Maxtor-- no problems with it... although it was a nightmare at the beginning. I had a USB2 card w/ driver issues for the LONGEST time, but had thought that it was a drive problem.

That being said, I just had an internal Maxtor fail about 2 months ago, and it had only been in service for a year and a half or so.

David.

I'm using five Maxtor USB and FireWire drives, two for video editing and three for storage/backup. One of the video drives died after a few weeks, Maxtor replaced it no questions asked. One of the storage drives died after about a year, ditto. Performance has been great all the way around and you couldn't ask for better service. Of course, I would rather not have had either drive crash on me, especially the storage drive. I'm just glad everything was backed up!

I'm about to purchase a drive for my personal system and I will definitely be buying another Maxtor.

I have the 200gb maxtor 5000DV. It has been fine. Ofcourse i turn it off when i know i'm not gonna be using it for a while.

I have a couple of Western Digital 160-Gig USB2 drives. They've worked flawlessly so far (had 'em about a year). They came preformatted as NTFS, which is good.

I also have a WD 80-Gig USB2 drive, which I picked up because Circuit City had them on sale at a really good price a while back. I discovered when I first used it for a Capture that it came preformatted as FAT32 -- so my captured file was broken into several parts (I use scLive as my capture utility). So I did a quick reformat to NTFS, to avoid any more encounters with FAT32's 4-Gig filesize limit. No problems resulted.

Does IBM still sell its hard drives under its own name?

They sold 70% of their hard drive business to Hitachi recently and now the deskstars are sold under the name Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

Here's the press relsease Hitachi, IBM reach definitive agreement on hard disk drive operations

So I think if you see the IBM name, it would be older stock.

Apparently, IBM/Hitachi are back up to producing high-quality drives. IBM hit a rough patch for a bit, but now StorageReview.com has the 7K250 as its top 7200 RPM drive. Before that Western Digital Drives held the top 7200 RPM spot for three years. So either of these is probably a good bet. I've been hearing a lot of people happy with Samsung drives. I have WD and Maxtor and have had no problems so far.

The external USB2 drives from Buslink work like a charm. Stay away from the ADS Pyro sleeves. They're great for general storage, but Vegas deosn't like them.

Couple of months ago I purchased a 200 gig 7200 rpm Lacie firewire. Works like a charm, quiet, very quick. But only 2 months so longevity???

I have two, 200 GB Western Digital external drives (USB). One has been in use for about one year and the other for about 4 months. I have never had a problem with either of them - not once.

JCG

Thanks for the feedback buster. That explains why I couldn't find the IBM's.

I'll check out Hitachi & Samsung. I looked on CNET for them but they don't even list them as manufacturers. I tried to get onto StorageReview.com but there site is down.

What type of problems are you having with your Maxtor & WD drives?

Ooops, that should read NO problems so far. I'll go an edit my post.

In light of that you may want to consider WD as well.

WD drives are pretty widely availabe and often on sale if that is a consideration.

I have Maxtors, Seagates and Fujitsus. Just bought a WD 160Go but won't comment on it since I got it since just a week.
I've only had problems with my 2 Fujitsus, like 3 of my friends. We returned those. Lately, they started to offer money instead of replacement drive, which led me to buy the WD which was on sale. Passed from 20Go to 160Go in the process.
Fujitsu, I think, just makes drives for laptops now. Good idea if this info is good cause I wouldn't buy a single one of them anymore...

I've read many complaints about each and every brand. A drive that passes out is always a nightmare anyway, whichever brand it is so you'll read all kinds of complaints that are all justified individually by their respective owners. So far, my oldest drive is a Maxtor 30Go: NO problem with it.

And, by the way, IF it's the same as it used to be 2 years ago, LaCie packs up Maxtors in those external drives which they sell you for an arm... See other topics regarding ext. hard drives and you could learn how to save at *least* a hundread bucks... just look for an enclosure that's got an Oxford chipset inside and find a drive that's on sale (there IS plenty of them all over the web...)

I personally prefer the Maxtor lines of drives. I work at a computer store as a repair tech, and most of the percentage of failed drives is Western Digital. My brother has had one or 2, and they eventually start making noises and fail. I've owned several Maxtors and never had an issue with them. Samsung is a good line, but I'm not sure where I stand on IBM. Had a Desktar for almost a year, and 3 times it dumped Windows before it finally crashed. Warranty replaced it, but the new one is a Hitachi. So far, no problems with it.

Ben

I have both a WD 200 and a Maxtor 200 in little plastic trays that I can slide in and out of a slightly-modified ADS Pyro firewire enclosure. Both drives work great.

Of all the drives I have, the only difference I can note is that my Seagate 80GB drive (about 2 years old) gets hot enough to fry an egg. Even so, it still runs fine, and in fact is currently my C drive.

For what its worth local PC mag gave Samsung a good rap. They're pretty new to the business so they're probably working hard to build a reputation.

BTW no one 'makes' a drive. The platters are made by several companies as are the heads. WD, Maxtor etc just buy the bits and assemble them with their own electronics.

good rap = good review?

In the US idiom, good rap could mean a good smack which would negative.

riredale: those 80Go Seagates are Barracudas no? I got exactly the same and since they are completely "wrapped" by casing ( hence less noise) lots of people just put a h.drive fan right underneat to cool'em down. But check this fan periodically: my two fan motors got seized at some point and instead of cooling, they generated HEAT! so check them from time to time OR buy a *good* one (I went for cheap ones thinking that a fan is a fan is a fan... nope!).

Jessariah: <They're great for general storage, but Vegas deosn't like them.
>> That may be your experience. I have five external firewire enclosures - two ADS Pyro, three Maxtor "permanently sealed" jobs. I've opened all of them to swap out drives.

On my system, V4 (or V3 for that matter) could care less whether my drives (Maxtors and WD) are in the Maxtor enclosures or the ADS Pyro enclosures.

I have an assortment of eight different drives that I swap in and out of these enclosures - so for no failures.

I did experience my very first HD failure, however, on a new HP Pavillion computer that I bought for the Mrs. Computer ran fine for the first few weeks, then, refused to boot up - "no operating system found."

HP support tried to convince me that all I needed was a set of restore disks - but I could tell that the drive wasn't spinning, and, to prove it, I swapped out the OEM drive for one I knew was working, loaded WinXP and everything was fine.

To their credit, when I called HP and explained that I was suspect of their analysis, they sent me a new drive, no questions asked, plus the restore diskettes that allowed me to get the machine up and running in no time.

BTW, this new HP (it's a cheapo 2.5 gig AMD with a cdrw, minimal everything else - paid $350 for it as an open box special at one of the superboxes - is set up to make swapping out a hard drive simpler and faster than any of my external enclosures.

Cover comes off the computer with no tools, HD is secured by a sort of snap in plastic bracket that also comes out without tools. Only tool needed was a phillips head to back out the drive screws and resecure them after mounting the new drive. What a pleasant surprise.

The failed drive was a Quantum by the way.

The Mrs. is a happy camper now (all she does on the computer is email and Pagemaker, LOL).

Caruso