Maxtor vs. Quantum .... isn't this interesting?

Slackmaster2K

Slackmaster2K

Gone
For a while now my two favorite hard drive companies were Maxtor and Quantum. While I have had problems with drives from the other companies from IBM to Western Digital, I have never had a complaint about Maxtor or Quantum.

So which drive is better you ask? It doesn't matter!

"Maxtor to acquire Quantum disk drive group for $2.3B

Maxtor Corp. and Quantum Corp.'s Hard Disk Drive Group today announced they will
merge their disk manufacturing companies into what they say will be world's
leading disk drive company.

http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO51931,00.html?pm "

I'm not sure this is a good thing though, since most of their competition consists of bumbling idiots.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Sad news. Maxtor's have been getting better the past couple of years though. So maybe it will work out. In the meantime... it's Fujitsu and IBM for me. (probably manufactured by Maxtor/Quantum anyway :) ) ah well.
 
Just had an IBM 20GB 7200RPM Deskstar shit cakes on me. A weird failure too, related to the electronics and not the disks themselves. In fact it was so strange that twice I convinced myself that there was no problem :)

Searching dejanews I noticed an odd pattern with newer Deskstar owners. Nobody pointing fingers at the drives, but a lot of bizzare problems similar to mine being blamed on controllers and overclocking. I'm not sure if there's any connection.

Here's what went down. Every couple months, I'd lose windows to file corruption. The first time it happened I reinstalled and ran a thourogh scandisk, which at first reported two bad clusters but the rest of the disk checked out fine. No big deal I thought, it's not uncommon to have a couple minor disk imperfections.

The next time I lost windows, I reformatted and reinstalled. Same thing when I ran scandisk. Same bad clusters....I started to think maybe it was just a weird deal with the highpoint controller on the Abit BE6-II, so I moved the drive back to the standard IDE controller. Nope.

The third time I lost windows I repartitioned, and it took several times to complete the drive verification problem. I could hear the something was goofy with the drive...a repetetive searching & grinding noise and then the verification would start over. After reinstalling this time, scandisk reported some 14 bad clusters. WTF? I thought I had permanent physical disk damage.

I downloaded a utility from IBM to check the drive and it would fail during the SMART check. Weird....it's screwed right? So just for shits I use the utility to do a low level format of the drive (zeroing) and I repartition and reformat and reinstall.

Well like magic...no bad clusters reported by scandisk this time at all! I rerun the IBM utility and the drive passes all tests.

Needless to say, I sent the drive back as it was still under warranty. It was in a standard PIII system with an Abit BE-6 motherboard. No overclocking....nothing fancy.

If anyone has had a similar experience I'd be interested in hearing it. I'm not sure whether this is an isolated incident or not.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Yes Indeedy! My 13GB Deskstar started pulling that shit immediately and worsened to the point where I demanded a warranty replacement. Since then, with an exactly cloned cousin- not a burp not a fart. Just some pretty smokin' performance for the price. One more tidbit. I have seen WD HDs fail, but I've seen them last as well. I've seen Maxtors fail early as well. Pretty insignificant statistically but very convincing (for me), personally.

[Edited by drstawl on 10-05-2000 at 21:28]
 
For whats its worth....Ihave three maxtor drives all purchased in the last two months ....two have worked fine and one died ...I guess two out of three isn't bad....the tech support was good and the drive was replaced within two days at my local store....Thanks to emeric for suggesting buying local...it makes these seemingly inevitable problems easy to sort out...
 
Shit. Are these the IBM Deskstar 75GXP?

I read good reviews and was just thinking about buying one.

My 5.1GB Quantum Fireball has been working fine for the past 2 years.

I heard that IBMs were supposed to be reliable. Now I'm confused...
 
IBM's are good drives. Any one of the mentioned drives can and will fail. Some are more likely to fail than others, sooner or later.

What I'm getting at. Just buy the drive, but please backup to another medium - always. Don't put too much trust in a hard drive, regardless of the manufacture..er.
 
Well, I like to spot trends. It's not uncommon for a manufacturer to put absolute garbage for a year, and then the next year be completely reliable. Take Western Digital for instance...they put out so much shit for so long that I won't even consider buying one now, even though their track record has improved.

It's good to hear stories like this in my opinion. Especially when the drive has been in use for some time. While it isn't uncommon to have a drive fail within the first month or so, it is uncommon for a drive to fail after 6 months of much use. That's the kind of stuff I like to hear about because like most people, I don't have the resources to do a full backup every night.

The good news is that almost all drives carry long warranties and can be replaced fairly quickly.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Well, I'm going to buy a hard drive today.

At first I was determined to get the IBM but now I'm not so sure, maybe I'll stick with Quantum. I guess price/what the salesman can con me into will determine my decision.

Wish me luck.
 
My take on Hard drives

In my years as PC salesman / PC Tech / Helpdesk and Net tech I have sold/installed/troubleshot and administered last rites to hard drives from Maxtor, Quantum, Western Digital, Conner, IBM, Seagate, Fujitsu, Samsung, and Kaylock (plus a few more I probably forgot). With the exception of Kaylock (so horrible they deservedly went out of business years ago) I have found them all to be more or less the same. Slackmaster is right, sometimes manufactures will have a bad "lot" or a buggy model but this should not damn the whole company for eternity. When you manage a few hundred PCs (which I do in my day job) you inevitably run across the occasional lemon hard drive. In buying a hard drive for myself I look at price/performance, and how well the company's customer service is. In my recent experiance I have had good customer service from both Maxtor and Western Digital, so that's my two cents. For more objective info I would suggest checking PC Magazine, or Ziff-Davis on the web. But don't let anyone tell you "all of XXXX hard drives are crap" because its just not true.
 
Hehe....

Hey RWhite, don't listen to Slack. He just loves to hate Western Digital, even when the proof is stacked against him! ;)

I have had a WD drive for over a year and a half that has worked quite well. A few bad clusters, but I am thinking this was a result of when I was actually trying to get Win 95 to run stable, and had to shut off the computer several times when it froze. Since I have quit trying to deal with 9X OS's, the drive has not had one new bad cluster. So..........who knows.

Ed
 
No, I pretty much feel it's my duty to warn against Western Digital. They've historically produced low quality drives at low prices. I have seen little to demonstrate otherwise.

I've seen way way way too many western digital drives fail. I will see more. I will say things like, "see, told ya so." I'm not talking about failures after 3 months, I'm talking about failures after 3 years...the BAD failures that shouldn't happen.

I reserve my right to be an asshole :)

Slackmaster 2000
 
me too... I've seen way too many Maxtor's fail. :) That's why I don't use them, or sell them. But, now I have no choice... :)

wow.. 2 smiley's.


All drives have bad clusters, it's an unavoidable part of the manufacturing process. Bad sectors, well that's maxtors and WD's forte.
 
3 years? give me a break. Don't expect that out of anything electronic. Especially something that works hard... like a hard drive. Anyway, after 3 years it's so damn slow it's useless anyway, compared to what would then be current. If you get 2 years out of a drive before upgrading to the latest and greatest, count yourself lucky.

Backup your data.
 
A good drive will have a life expectancy that will exceed the life of the computer. After the drive has been running in place for a time, it should run damn near indefinately. I remember reading power on hours stats in the 300,000 hour range just a few years back (hence the lifetime warranties offered by some companies)...maybe drives have gotten worse but I doubt it.

A hard drive should either fail right quick...or outlast the machine...given decent working conditions.

In fact...looking over some data on random drives from both Maxtor and WD...I'm seeing data from 350,000 to 500,000 power on hours with component design life ratings of 5 years....anual failure rates of <0.8%.

Yeah, backing up your data is always a good idea...but a hard drive loss ALWAYS sucks...and you'll almost ALWAYS lose some data.

Slackmaster 2000

[Edited by Slackmaster2K on 10-17-2000 at 23:19]
 
With regard to bad clusters, I have found it very uncommon to find bad clusters on a new drive. In the old days (>8 years ago) it was not uncommon to find a few bad clusters on new drives (some companies used to attach a sticker to the top of the drive listing them). But the manufacturing standards today would make that quite unusual. If I found a new drive with bad clusters I would re-FDISK and format it, and if it came up with bad cluster again I would try to return it.

As for hard drives lasting, I'll say this. At my (day job) company we have been phasing out our older computers (Pentium 200, 64 meg RAM, 1 - 8 GIG hard drives) and replacing them with new ones (Pentium III, 256 meg RAM, 20 gig drives). Most of the Pentium systems I have been retiring have been running non-stop for 2-5 years. While there have been some drive failures and a few drives have developed bad clusters the majority (>90%) are still running perfectly. Most of the drives in our older systems are Western Digital, with Quantum Fireball drives coming in our newer units.
 
Gee, I've become a senior member again! I don't feel any older.... does this mean if I don't post for awhile I'll get younger?
 
Rwhite, Congrats on your promotion!

I've run into bad clusters on a few new drives, and your right not as many in previous days(conner/seagate). But anyway, bad clusters are no big deal, sectors is another matter.

Slack I see what your saying. It will be interesting to see how the 7200RPM drives of recent days last in comparison to the older 5400 and < drives. I've had this Quantum 7200 for 13 months now. I do imagine replacing it with something faster before it dies though... 10K RPM IDE maybe, or some new drive tech on the horizon. Doesn't matter though, price/performance is always the bottom line.
 
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