computer geeks
those of you who may like maxtor drives. and those of you who like seagate.
maxtor has just posted that they have signed the papers to merg.. with seagate. thats going to give us monster great drives . but i wonder at what the prices will go to.

 

Western Digital > Seagate or Maxtor. I had 3 Barracuda's die in a week.

 

I've had more Maxtors die then any other HD combined. Oddly I've never had a Samsung go south yet and they come wit ha 3 yr warranty.

 

I just had a maxtor go south on me

 

Maxtors have been pretty good to me too. The maxtor that has my win2k3 install on it functions perfectly. Even with 3 broken off pins (I can't set the jumpers for it to be a master, just Cable select) and its been working this way for round about 2 years.

Though i just went and bought a 120gb drive, so i can back everything up...and just pitch this drive when it dies.

 

I have brought dead drives of every brand back to life using some of maxtors software off there website. One good example is powermax. They have alot of good software for transferring data, recovering drives, partitioning and so forth free to download on their website. If anyone uses this software I would suggest you download the latest versions and archive it. After seagate takes control it could all go south. Maxblast is a very useful utility package free to download on maxtors site.

 

I have never had a drive from maxtor fry so to speak, both my desk tops have them, one is a old 40 gig and my new one with 2 sata's at 300g. plus i have built several hundred custom units with out one drive problem.
Drives fail for mostly unknown reasons but very rarely get a burned spot on a disc any more. Or even a bad board. not like in the old days of the 512 mb drives and dos/win 3.11 erea. In fact most of the computer problems that i repair, are from bad downloaded software or people trying to use not so legal corupt soft ware that make them think the drive failed.
If you think you have a bad drive, almost every drive company has free software to test your drive before you say it failed. down load it from another computer, put it a floppy and run a surface scan/ drive test on, your drive before you blame the drive. must of these programs do fit and run off a small floppy disc that you boot from to run the test.
I'd even bet in almost 90% of cases with people thinking they have a bad drive, really have bad or incompatable software causeing the problem. or even a virus.
My post was for some of us who may have " like me" stock in both companys. Plus hanging on my wall at home is comptia a plus,network plus and microsoft mscse training and certifactions. i paid a lot of money to be trained to only have every job i went for say your to old. so now they are just more wall paper on my wall.
I still build custom units and will continue to use both drive companys product with pride.

 

Good advice but I was talking about even tested units. Maxtor has just been junk in my experience.

 

computer whiz folks,

Where can I learn about all this? Online, magazines, books, trade publications? Thanks for any assistance!

Russ

 

Very well said.

 

You can get most any info you need off the web. Most of it comes with experience though. I got some of my info off the web, some from books and some I got from pure curiousity (purposely crashing my system to bring it back to life). I do not suggest crashing your system though. If you put your heart into it you can learn very quick. I bought my first pc 6 years ago and could not even properly shut it down. I started building systems 3 years ago. Now I build them, upgrade them, repair them and network them. I am by no extent an expert I learn everyday. Sometimes I still get stumped but I always figure it out in the end.

As far as drives go I agree with captchas, out of hundreds of drives that were presumed dead I have only run across a couple I could not recover. I have never run across a maxtor or seagate that could not be recovered. I have run across one quantum fireball and one western digital that could not be recovered. The quantum had been dropped.

 

Press release:

http://www.thetechlounge.com/news.php?id=8487

Q & A with Seagate:

http://www.computerworld.com/hardwar...107256,00.html

 

A lot of Seagates come with a 5 yr warranty, or at least they did the last time I checked this fall.

I agree about the Maxblast; I've recovered drive errors with it and they continue to run fine.

Samsung gets good reviews, but I have yet to buy an IBM drive. Those deskstar drives were the kiss of death. Fujitsu used to be junk, too. Don't know how good they are now.

Some of you may remember the problems Western Dig had with that bad batch of 6.4 gig drives a few years back.

 

i'm in no way saying they don't fail some do. just when some one thinks it has . down load the companys harddrive check first and run it.
i have had to change a few over the years and most were cooked by a lighting hit and not haveing a good surge stripe. customers answer was i have one! yes how much did it cost?. $10.00! you all now how good that is.
i personally find most is bad software or a problem drive check repairs.
but again i have stock in both companys so this merg is going to make me some coin