[wplug] OT - word of warning on Maxtor 250GB drives

[Jason Carr]

Neither are indicative of poor quality.  In order to test you'd have to
have different machines with different motherboards, different power
supplies, and different service loads.  Maybe you push your drives too
hard in a non-ventilated area that is overpowered.  Maybe you just
bought a bad batch.  I don't want to turn this into "you suck", so I'm
not pointing any fingers.  If you like Hitachi, stick with them.

It seems as if all drives suck.  I've always stuck to Western Digital,
but many many people say they suck ass too.  I've had to replace mine
only because of loud noises.  I've also seen Maxtor drives in highly
used 3 TB arrays never die after 2-3 years in use.

I used to fix IBM Thinkpads and IBM Desktops, they almost all had
Hitachi drives and guess what, I saw a bunch of Hitachi drive failures.
So scope has to play into this also.

You also might just have really bad luck.

Honestly, we already knew this but magnetic media sucks and is fragile.
This is why we have things such as RAID 5 and backups.  If you know
something is going to die, buy two and RAID 1 them or buy 3+ and RAID 5
them.  Backup critical stuff so you don't get caught with your pants
down just because you think you bought the best drive ever, and just
because you have RAID 1 or 5, a physical fire can destroy the whole
array.  Keep off-site backups too.  I should note, I don't do any of
these, but unlike me, if you really want that data forever, back it up. 

- Jason

On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 16:02 -0500, Vanco, Don wrote:
> wplug-bounces+don.vanco=agilysys.com at wplug.org <theoretically > put
> forth the following electrons on :
> > > Seagate = Maxtor = (IMO) crap
> > > http://www.seagatemaxtor.com/
> > 
> > Oh boy, there's an unqualified opinion.  Seriously, how long
> > has Seagate owned Maxtor for?  Answer - 0 days.  The waiting
> > period for the anti-trust review expired TODAY.  Now they can
> > go ahead and merge product lines, figure out what's next etc.
> >  Up until today (and actually probably for a few more days
> > still), Maxtor was more or less independent.  They couldn't
> > even share IP between the two.
> > 
> > Also, lumping all seagates into the same category as maxtor
> > because they're made by the same company is like saying that
> > a Corvette sucks because the same company makes the Aveo.
> 
> Fair enough.  How's this:
> Of the Seagate drives I've owned in the past 12 months, 50% have failed,
> of the Maxtor, 25% of the 250's and 50% of the 120s.  Of the Hitachi
> 250's I've had (4) none have even hiccupped (now I've likely jinxed
> myself).  Seagate SATAs seem to suck it exceptionally hard.  Drive
> quality waxes and wanes with manufacturers - but IMO both Seagate and
> Maxtor are at an all-time low.
> Sure, you can argue that 4 drives is hardly a large cross-sectional
> sampling, but a 50% failure rate is fairly significant regardless, and
> nothing I've experienced prior to going to spindles > 80GB.  I've gone
> through many, many TB of drives in the last 13 or so years...
> 
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