I just bought 2 of the Maxtor's and had a crash, which I thought was due to problems with my ADS Firewire interface (still do... sort of).
Does anyone have conclusive problems with Maxtor?
They certainly are one of the biggest around.

So far my record with WD has been 100% good drives out of at least 50. We've been running some of them over 10 years now and many of them over 5 years. Maxtors have been running about a 20% failure rate in the first year, but we've only had about 10 of them.

I'd love to add a 120GB drive but already have a 40 and a 30 onboard. I noticed that I have more bays open in my tower but I don't have any more plugs on my ribbon cable for another drive. What else do I need to do to get to put a third drive for my dedicated Vegase drive on my Dell Dimension 8100?

Thanks,

TomG

I've had nothing but problems with Maxtor drives. On the other hand, I've never had a problem or failure with WD or IBM.

Tom, how many CD/DVD drives do you have installed? You have two IDE ports, each of which can connect to two drives. If you've only got one CD/DVD drive then you may connect another hard drive to the CD/DVD drive's cable. In other words, you can have a total of four IDE drives. If you're already full then you can add another IDE interface card in one of the PCI slots, assuming you have one available.

The other issue is drive bays. I'm looking at Dell's online documentation for the 8100 right now. It's hard to tell from the pictures, but it looks like you have three 5.25" bays and either one or two 3.5" bays. If you've only got one 3.5" bay then you've only got room for four drives inside the case. So, if you've already got all the bays full then you'll have to look into an external drive connected to either firewire or USB 2. If you do have a 5.25" bay available then you'll probably have to get mounting rails to allow a 3.5" drive to fit in a 5.25" bay.

I'll sit on the fence because I've had two drives fail in the last three years. One was a Maxtor and the other was a 100 GB WD (Ouch!)...

Al

Thanks, Chien.

I have two CD-RW drives onboard but really only need one. Figure I can swap one out one for a third HD? Have plenty of room in the case. Think the existing power supply will handle a third HD?

TomG

Tom, i've got a 250W power supply that's easily handling four hard drives, a CD-RW drive, and a DVD drive. For that matter, the hard drive probably takes about as much power as the CD drive you're taking out.

bdunn,

Was the Best Buy/Western Digital deal in store only? I couldn't find any reference to it on their web site. Hopefully it wasn't just a weekend sale and I can check the store tomorrow.

I have a WD 120gig mounted in a ADS Pyro external firewire drive kit that is running smooth and fast and I'd like to get another one going for my other computer.

My two cents: I stopped using Maxtor drives several years ago after several failures.

I'm not certain why we're trashing Maxtor here, but, I have six of them, two internal IDE's, three of the 80-gig externals, one IDE in my ADS enclosure. Never a moments trouble with any of them. The internals have been running non-stop for nearly four years, now.

If you run a large number of drives, sooner or later, I would expect one or two to finally fail, no matter who makes it. Not sure that either WD or Maxtor deserves to be described in four-letter words because of it.

Caruso

--If you run a large number of drives, sooner or later, I would expect one or two to finally fail, no matter who makes it. Not sure that either WD or Maxtor deserves to be described in four-letter words because of it.

That's true, and maybe I've just had some bad luck. But here's what I know-- I had a main hard drive fail, a media drive fail (in a different computer), and issues with an external drive. And they were all Maxtor. Never had that problem with any other brand (although all the others have been WD), and will never go back to Maxtor.

If you're not a tech guru (because I'm certainly not), and you'd lost a good deal of material and productive time to drive failure, then you'd be cursing them out, too.
And like I said, maybe I just got a bad batch, I don't know. But I don't go through 'a large number of drives,' you know? I'm never running more than 3 total (two internal, one external) at any given moment...

David.

I added an external drive with a firewire interface and connected it to one of the spare firewire ports on my firewire card.

Actually I bought an enclosure big enough to take a HD cradle and now I can change HD's by turning off the power to the external case, slip out the HD, slip another in, turn the power back on and away we go!

After all, it seems its a mixed story about the Maxtor DiamondMMax PLus 9. some people swear to it, and just hate it due to the high failure rate. This seems to be the same what happen to IBM some time ago.

At the moment i only have an old 14GB HD, WD if im not wrong, its no problem for me to capture video through FW, i dont even get a single drop of frames :)

Anyway, back to the Maxtor series. Many of the test i have read, it beats WD when it comes to minimum and avarage (read) speed. I dont have the url as i am at school now.

But one thing that bug me about Maxtor, many people says it got a high pitch tone that some people can hear and some cannot. This is really bugging me.

Then you have WD, which is somewhat a bit slowe, not much i guess, but is it worth it? I also have my eyes on a IBM disk, but....oh man, which disk to chose?

does anyone reccomend any drive and why that one?

Frankie
Singapore

BTW: 80-120GB is what im looking for

Bluehawk,
Not sure if it is a Bestbuy in store special or not. I just happened to notice it while shopping at the store. I don't see anything on their web or in the Sunday flyer. But I did find the same drive advertised in the Circuit City Sunday flyer of $90.
FWIW, I've used Seagate, Maxtor, WD and IBM drives through the years and guess I've just been lucky as I can't remember any of them failing.

Just lost a 3 month old 80gb Maxtor this weekend. Just started making a few taps; checked Maxtor's site Sunday, which says this is "Normal." 2 Hrs later - Gone; I'm soooo F#$%@$@$ &issed!!!! I will never buy another Maxtor - What happened to 500k hours to average failure????

I'm trying fans to cool my HDs now. As mentioned by a previous poster, the heat that 7200 r.p.m. drives produce frightens me and I'm an electronics tech.

Al

You wanna talk about heat? I have a Seagate 7200rpm 80GB drive, about 1 year old, and it gets so hot I can't touch the side case with my finger for more than about 2 seconds before I have to pull away. But it's kept on running, 24 hours straight, for the past year without any complaint. It's beautifully packaged, too--a brushed-steel top that would look good in any luxury dash panel, and a cover for the electronics on the bottom to boot. Gee, I sound like a Geek, talking about the relative esthetics of hard drives...

I also have two WD 120GB drives, one with a 2MB buffer, and the other with the larger 8MB buffer. Both run at normal (warm) temperatures, so the Seagate is definitely an anomaly.

Marquat: you could do a tally to see just how large a power supply would be needed to run you setup, but my gut feel is that 250w should have been adequate. I've heard that power supplies are pretty fickle units sometimes.

In the morning paper today, Fry's Electronics is selling the Maxtor 120GB drive for $90 after rebate.

Re:the heat hd's put out. I taped the external sensor from the device I use to monitor the temp on my amd xp1600 cpu, to the top of a maxtor 7200 rpm drive, and it was hotter than my cpu, (50c+ versus 42-45c). Also had a new WD 7200 drive I had stacked closely atop another in a raid array die in about a week. Space and cool your hard drives, folks. Try to get a fan blowing some air over them. Heat will kill these devices faster than anything..

Hey Kevmiami... you talking about an EXTERNAL firewire? If so, chances are your Matrox drive and data are fine. I ranted about these drives several times and was on my second replacement, or third drive all failed. The problem is simple. It isn't the drive, it their cheesy interface card.

A. Call them up, they will send a replacement.
B. Once you get the replacement open the case of the original, unplug drive, set aside.
C. Do same for you old drive.
D. Put your old drive in the case the new drive came in.

It probably will work fine. Now copy all your data to the new drive, place it back in the new case and send back your old drive in the old being sure you keep the new interace card which is the source of the problem.

At some point you may do what I did. Just remove the drive and use it in a drawer. I've done that about a year ago now and the "bad" Matrox drive worked fine ever since.

Hi BillyBoy,

Thanks for the suggestion, unfortunately, the 120gb Firewire Maxtor I have, works fine; it was the 7200rpm "system/program/data" drive that blew its brains out. As an uniformed observer, it seems the 7200 rpm Maxtor drives are not of the same robustness as the older-slower drives.

Yesterday, I ordered the new FastTrack TX4000 Raid Controller ($122); this is a four channel PCI card (very cool). I currently have two WD120's setup as a RAID 0(fast)on my ASUS MB (built in Promise RAID controller) and a dead Maxtor80 (*#!!!*#*@). I will purchase two more WD120's today, and the question is:

Should I set the four drives up as a 240gb RAID 10 (mirrored-striped RAID), or set up two drives as a mirroed 120gb RAID 1 for the "System/program/data" drive and and the other two as a 240gb striped RAID 0 "Video Drive?" Obviously, I loose 120gb of capacity with the RAID 10 (I can live with that) and the video drive is less secure w/o mirroring (I also live with that), but will the RAID 10 slow write speed enough to adversly affect affect capture/render.

In addition, I understand a RAID setup can tax the 32bit bandwith of the PCI bus (which can cause capture issues - I'm using Pyro 1394 PCI card); would there be any advantage to using the ASUS M.B. RAID controller for two drives and the PCI Card for the other two drives? (I understand this may be a dumb question, so please, be gentle - I'm an advocate of the only dumb question is - "Are we there yet?"). Thanks, Kevin.

I just wanted to add my experience to the list of Maxtor vs. WD.

I've owned six Western Digital drives over the last 10 years and one Maxtor.

WD 0.34 GB
WD 2 GB
WD 8 GB

Maxtor 20 GB

WD 30 GB
WD 80 GB
WD 120 GB


All the WD drives are still functioning without problems. Although I have retired the first couple due to capacity age. The Maxtor drive didn't completely die, but it did form some bad sectors after the first year and it had really slow transfer rates for a 7200 rpm drive. I couldn't do video for nothing. I replaced the Maxtor with the WD 30GB.


JBJones

I have to agree with you. I've had Maxtors in my last three machines. The current one has 5 Maxtors: 1 30 gig system drive and 4 40 gigs in an array. A Maxtor in a 386 had a head crash after about 10 years of use when I was about to give it to a friend.

Not to be too pedantic, but an individual's experience is a very limited study and dangerous to generalize on.

As always, the best approach is suspect ALL your equipment and back up frequently.

David