Hard Drive

Post by **Sylvus** » April 3, 2006, 12:25 pm

Okay, I'm having some problems with my Maxtor 250 Gb external drive. Some directories that I try to navigate to, be it with Windows Explorer or trying to get to them from a command prompt, hang everything for a second then say it couldn't be read due to some I/O error.

To that end I'm looking into buying a new drive. Speed of the drive is less a concern (this is strictly for media file storage) than size, reliability and price. I'm thinking of going with a 500 gb internal, anyone have any recommendations?

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » April 3, 2006, 1:09 pm

I have had similar problems, but they have all been with Maxtor drives (3 replacements under old warranty before I gave up). I only have one left which I need to replace soon since it pisses me off when I get that error when starting the OS.

Neost · Post by **Neost** » April 3, 2006, 1:15 pm

I've had a chance to deploy a large number of content delivery devices that utilize maxtor drives for caching/pre-positioning, etc. etc.

Of the 600 devices, the first 100-150 had maxtor scsi drives that failed at a significant rate, probably 30%.

Mid-stream Cisco changed to Maxtor SATA drives and we've seen a slightly higher failure rate on those SATA drives, closer to 35%.

Based on that I will never use Maxtor in anything again if I have a choice.

Can't offer any alternatives, just thought I'd provide that information.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » April 3, 2006, 1:58 pm

I've had much better luck with WD drives than Maxtor although I've had failures with both. I avoid Maxtor now. I can't recall the last time I've had a WD die on me. It was a few years ago.

Aabidano · Post by **Aabidano** » April 3, 2006, 2:06 pm

I've got a couple 250Gb ATA-100 WD Caviars I use for movies\music, Woot (http:\\www.woot.com) has them for $50 a pop about once a month.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » April 3, 2006, 3:00 pm

I've got 6 or 7 250GBs. Most are WD with a Diamond Max 300GB as well. My 250GB WD died but that was after several years of insanely heavy workloads.

I need to open my HD-Tivo and see what brand 250GB HD just died on me.

Mr Bacon · Post by **Mr Bacon** » April 3, 2006, 3:23 pm

Aabidano wrote:I've got a couple 250Gb ATA-100 WD Caviars I use for movies\music, Woot (http:\\www.woot.com) has them for $50 a pop about once a month.

They're also refurbished with a cache of only 2mb.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » April 3, 2006, 4:56 pm

Rellix wrote:
Aabidano wrote:I've got a couple 250Gb ATA-100 WD Caviars I use for movies\music, Woot (http:\\www.woot.com) has them for $50 a pop about once a month.
They're also refurbished with a cache of only 2mb.

Cache doesnt matter too much if the HD is just for movies/music.

Aabidano · Post by **Aabidano** » April 3, 2006, 5:04 pm

The ones I got are system pulls, refurbished really doesn't mean much on drives anymore. At most they'll low level format them.

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » April 3, 2006, 7:09 pm

Sylvus wrote:Okay, I'm having some problems with my Maxtor

Don't really have to go any further than that.. get rid of it.

Lots of lip service for WD in this thread, but I still think Seagate kicks their ass in terms of compatibility and durability.

Samsung seem to make good drives too.

Maxtor should be dragged out into the street and shot.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » April 3, 2006, 7:39 pm

I don't know if I'd call it lip service.. I'm just going by my experience. I'd call it real world data! It's not lip service if I back it up with my own money. As a matter of fact I've just purchased a 320GB WD that will be arriving tomorrow.

I do have a long standing bias sgainst Seagate. Perhaps they've improved since then.

However, the best drive I ever owned was a Quantum 240MB that still works. Although capacity is too small to be of any use these days.

http://topmicrousa.com/qugm24idehad.html

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » April 3, 2006, 10:50 pm

Part of my WD hatred comes from using their larger drives (160Gb+) with external enclosures; other brands work flawlessly, WD shows 132Gb.

Admittedly, this is an imcompatibility between the enclosures and WD drives, but you have to ask who isn't following the standard...

Still, if you have to choose between Maxtor and WD, there's no choice there.

noel · Post by **noel** » April 3, 2006, 11:22 pm

I've been using exclusively Seagate harddrives for years in both business and personal applications, and I've had only 1 failure that I can recall, which was fortunately part of a RAID that I had sparing for, so I was able to replace it rather quickly.

Ebumar · Post by **Ebumar** » April 4, 2006, 4:49 pm

Maxtor is crap. Sounds like that drive has bad read heads, or else they are going bad. Anyway, I'd go anything by Western Digital. I actually have never had a WD drive fail. However, the crap computers that we sell around here always have Maxtor drives, and that's one of our largest failures - yet also where we make our most money.

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