So on Feb 15th I bought 4 Maxtor MaxLine Pro 500gig drives for a RAID 5 server (model#7HF500). Fast forward to September and one drive fails, no big deal RAID 5, pay for advanced shipping replace the drive, rebuild the array, awesome. Then 9 days ago another HD fails, I contact Maxtor/Seagate immediately and they agreed to advance ship me a replacement for free since this was the second on to fail. Great. Tonight, I get the new drive. Install the new drive, boot up my server (turned off to avoid the next thing) and find out that ANOTHER drive has failed, so there goes my RAID aray (not to mention that 5 petabytes of anime).
THANKS MAXTOR.
P.S. I met some marketing guy at an event that maxtor/seagate was at and he confirmed that maxtors have terrible reliability but said that the seagate drives were much better. Anything has to be better then then 3 drives failing so close together, it must be a mfg issue. And yes the 3 drives that have failed were all purchased at the same time so were probably the same batch off the line. If you have a failed maxtor drive leave a comment and let me know.
–K
sELECTROclash.com 
Oh great. I have 4 Maxtor 500GB drives in a RAID 5 in my new HTPC. 2 of them I’ve had for a while, 2 I just bought. For the record, though, I’ve lost just as many Seagates as anything else. Last week it was a 160GB ATA Seagate, a few months ago I lost a 40GB IBM and a 40GB Samsung. I hate computers.
…wait, who is K? Is Mac lying under a dim sum cart in Chinatown after another coke-and-pork-buns binge at Grand Harmony?
This is Kevin, macs friend from college.
I got a Maxtor One Touch III 80Gb external HDD in August.
THE FIRST ONE: I took the unit home, but could not get it to work. Took it back to the store, and it was dead for them too. The light would come on, but no-one could read it. Dud unit; replaced.
THE SECOND ONE: Took replacement unit home – yay! Worked as advertised. Transferred files onto it, partition my own HDD to take advantage of new-found space. About 2 months later, when I’m running the diagnostics, it comes up with an error code. Says to contact vendor and replace unit. Contacted Maxtor / Seagate; they say to return unit to place of purchase. I take it back to vendor. Wait 90 mins while they transfer data from old drive to new drive.
THE THIRD ONE: Now, two months later, the drive starts making noises. An occasional noise like the disk is touching something, and the odd beep. Diagnostics continually come up with TEST FAILED, then diagnostic code A8D3D44C. I’m asking for my money back.
Maxtor? Never again.
Maxtor have a very bad and desrved reputation. This for me goes way back to the 80gb drives they did diamond max series. I had 7 go in a motter of 5months, only two were from the same batch.
If you have a maxtor or any hd that makes a clicker sqeaking type noise on power up. Get rid of the drive asap, hd failure waiting.
I use 650+ psu’s only, but have heard. Some times the same symptoms can happen with an overloaded pc, not enough psu power. Then still go on to hard failure.
Another problem i find with bigger capacity drives, is the error rates are rising. The dreaded cylinindrical error rears its ugly head. I find this more with using hds for media files of 1 to 10 gb files. No wonder some people prefering to use racks with external power supplies, and smaller drives no bigger than 300gb.
Maxtor, ibm, Seagate, hitachi, maxtor in no order, now all make useless hard drives.
An after thought as why so many manufactures hard drives getting noticed as bad. Because most are now in the same company group. IE Hitachi and IBM make same drives partenership or buy out. Find out who makes good drives, then see who there partners and other company aqusistions are first before parting again with money. I think there will only now be one maybe two good hard drive manufactures left. I did read a while ago the drive failures were blamned on hds getting bigger, but that was just bogus. I mean if you owned a company that made hds you would make sure they were reliable for everday 24/7 use. Otherwise your profits and company fail, and earned repututation becomes smelly, as the brown sewer stuff.
With all this great information about maxtor hdd’s. I am wondering when my 2 will fail. I have one i am trying to reload windows on. And continue to get 2 errors. Something about a bad MBR or something related to system volume. I have been thru fdisk and re-doing the partition several times. I go thru the quick and slow versions of ntfs formatting for XP Pro. I even tried a flava of vista. I was unsure of the problems to begin with. But am almost certain it is a hdd issue. So i am now in the market for a 200 to 300 gig hdd. Kudos to any hdd maker other then seagate/maxtor ….
Never put anything on a Maxtor drive that you don’t want to lose. “Crapstor.”
Seagate USED to be the best then they bought Maxtor – bad move. Now I don’t know WHO to trust.
I have had a Maxtor 200gb IDE hard drive fail and a 160gb IDE hard drive fail too. I have lost faith in Maxtor now and have bought Western Digital hard drives ever since and to date they are as reliable since the day i bought them and now after Seagate buying Maxtor out i will be avoiding this brand too!
To be honest guys, I purchased a 120GB and a 200GB (Both IDE) Maxtor for my PC 5yrs ago and have used them constantly and the 120 is still going strong with no bad sectors. Also the 200GB works fine but has a couple of bad sectors.
Not too bad?
Hard drives from every manufacturer I know have failed for me over the years, both at home and in the machines I supported at work. I wonder if there is a manufacturer who doesn’t have failures. I do find the 7200 RPM drives fail sooner because they run considerably hotter than the old 5400 RPM! These days I put fans blowing air over all my hard drives and add backup disks or externals to all my machines.
When I was doing free lance computer service repair in Houston Texas, I stopped using Maxtor drives. There were several times that I replaced drives in customers computers, only to have the brand new maxtor drive fail within 4 months.
Its kinda difficult to keep explaining to customers “why” their brand new drives failed. I lost of a lot of business because of the poor quality of maxtor drives. Because of this, I have not bought a maxtor drive in 6 years.
Yep, I’ve had a 320Gb 2.5″ maxtor drive fail on me after a week, really fkkng annoying.
Maxtor have an awful track record for reliability. No surprise they were bought by seagate eventually and of course seagate also specialise in unreliable hard disks. Typical seagate problems include failing motor and eventual sector errors. The most reliable hard disks have been made by Samsung. Unfortunately Samsung hard disk company has now been acquired by the awful seagate. Needless to say I will not be buying samsung/seagate offspring in future. That leaves Western Didgeridoo for mass storage.