backtop

Print 32 comment(s) - last by TomZ.. on Nov 29 at 11:37 PM
Now the retail drives get the same treatment the bare drives do

Effective immediately, Seagate Technology today announced a three-year limited warranty on every Maxtor branded Internal Hard Drive Retail Kit that is now shipping worldwide. The new three-year limited warranty applies retroactively to all Maxtor Hard Drive Kits in retail channel inventory, or purchased by consumers on or after October 1, 2006. Previously, retail-boxed drives carried only a one year limited warranty, whereas the bare drives have always included three year coverage.

 

"Whether it's an internal hard drive or a simple to use external storage and backup solution, Seagate has a product for everyone," said Jim Druckrey, senior vice president and general manager for Seagate Branded Solutions. "Our Maxtor Branded Retail Kits include an industry leading drive manufactured by Seagate, giving consumers the quality assurance and reliability the industry has come to expect from Seagate. The positive response we have received from our retail partners is a testament to their confidence in our ability to deliver products that blend value, innovative storage technology and reliability."

 

Maxtor Retail Kits are designed for users who want to replace or upgrade their internal hard drives in their PC or Mac to capacities up to 500GB. The kits include components users need to install the new hard drive, such as mounting screws and a PATA or SATA cable. Suggested retail price ranges from $79.95 for 80GB to $239.95 for 500GB.

Comments     Threshold


This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled
Good news, but still don't trust Maxtors
By xstylus on 11/29/06, Rating: 0
By paohyean on 11/29/2006 6:48:03 AM , Rating: 2
I agree with you. My new Maxtor 200gig already broke down twice in less than 5 months. I don't think I'll ever buy a Maxtor harddisk again even if they're giving 10 years warranty for their harddisks. I'll be going for Western Digital and Hitachi instead. I've been using my WD 80gig for over 4 years already and it's still running without any problems up until today.


By Russell on 11/29/2006 10:15:14 AM , Rating: 2
Masterpieces of crap or not, you don't have to worry about that anymore. Seagate sells rebadged Seagate drives as Maxtors these days. You probably can't even buy a real Maxtor drive anymore.


RE: Good news, but still don't trust Maxtors
By MrCoyote on 11/29/2006 10:34:55 AM , Rating: 2
Maxtor is just as reliable as any other brand. At work we've had an equal amount of WD, IBM, Seagate, Fujitsu drives fail as did Maxtor drives.

Ever think about putting your drives in a mirrored array, ie. RAID 1 ? I wouldn't take a chance with ANY brand and that's why I always run RAID .


RE: Good news, but still don't trust Maxtors
By Jackyl on 11/29/06, Rating: 0
RE: Good news, but still don't trust Maxtors
By TomZ on 11/29/2006 11:43:29 AM , Rating: 2
That's silly advice. RAID 0 is perfectly fine for users who want high performance at a low cost, and have a good backup strategy.

Also, RAID 1 is not without risk. Last year, I had a workstation with RAID 1 that had an intermittant power connection to one of the hard drives. After I fixed the connection, due to a problem with the crappy Promise RAID BIOS, I ended up losing the entire array because it refused to re-mount the old drive into the array. After trying lots of things, I finally gave up and rebuilt the array, which of course forced a reinstall of my OS and all my apps, and restoring my data from a backup. When you have a situation like this happen, you quickly realize that RAID1 can give you a false sense of security.


RE: Good news, but still don't trust Maxtors
By mindless1 on 11/29/2006 8:32:10 PM , Rating: 2
If the data was still on the drive, intact, it wasn't the raid card bios at fault. You can take a RAID1 from a Promise (as with most (all?) others) and run the drive as a single span or JBOD, or even connect to a m'board's integral controller and get the data IF the drive partitions, filesystem, files are intact. No raid data or raid bios functionality is needed to do this and no raid card fault will interfere with recovery.

I'm not suggesting it's a reason to feel secure, only that the data or structures on the drive were already corrupt.


By TomZ on 11/29/2006 11:37:17 PM , Rating: 2
I thought that too, but when I plugged the drive into the motherboard's non-RAID controller port, it was not recognized as bootable.


By Wwhat on 11/29/2006 2:10:39 PM , Rating: 2
"at work" you say, I am guessing you used enterprise class drives at work though, perhaps if you compared desktop/cheap drives you'd find that maxtor had a justifiably bad reputation.


Perfect Timing
By SleepyItes on 11/29/2006 1:58:16 AM , Rating: 2
I just bought two Maxtor 500GB PATA drives for a mirrored array, and I was a little disappointed when I read the "1-yr Limited Warranty". Hopefully I won't need to cash in on it, but you never know.




RE: Perfect Timing
By soydeedo on 11/29/2006 4:27:21 AM , Rating: 2
haha. same here. i just bought a 300 gigger on monday simply because i couldn't pass up on the price. actually the price was so good i bought two. =P

glad to know i'm covered a little more.


RE: Perfect Timing
By Wwhat on 11/29/2006 12:36:34 PM , Rating: 2
You're only covered for the drive, and then probably only if it's a retail one, and you are not covered for loss of data at all, so how important is it that you can send in your drive, wait 3 weeks for a new one IF approved, and meanwhile you lost 300 to 500GB of data?


Hopefully this will cause....
By marvdmartian on 11/29/2006 9:53:52 AM , Rating: 2
....Western Digital to follow suit, and return their retail drives to 3 year warranties! I, like many others, was fairly disgusted when the retail drives fell to 1 year warranties, then excited when Seagate broke the mold, and went to 5 years.

Now perhaps this will force WD to match the Maxtor warranty!




RE: Hopefully this will cause....
By Wwhat on 11/29/2006 12:45:37 PM , Rating: 2
Their retail desktop drives you should say, their enterprise drives still have 5 years.
It's weird that their desktop bulk drives come with 3 years but their retail version with 1 year warranty.


New Maxtor Drives Are Seagates
By Slaimus on 11/29/2006 10:50:44 AM , Rating: 2
I recently bought a DiamondMax 21 drive, and it is a rebadged 7200.10 with a 3 year warranty. Since the Seagate ones are warranted for 5 years, this is actually a reduction in warranty.




RE: New Maxtor Drives Are Seagates
By Wwhat on 11/29/2006 2:25:44 PM , Rating: 2
Well if they have the same drive then they are good enough for seagate to trust them with 5 years and the reliability is there, plus if they drop the price because of the warrant time diff then you are still good, after 3 years the drive can be replaced with one and the space on it where you can copy the data from the old one is perhaps percentagewise even covered by the pricedifference you pay today :)



They are seagate drives.
By pugster on 11/29/2006 2:08:51 PM , Rating: 2
Seagate is starting to make many of the Maxtor drives now. I just brought a Diamondmax 21 hard drive. The box doesn't have the wide eyed guy's picture on the box and the box is smaller than the old maxtor boxes. It has a sticker 'this product is made in Thailand' It looks exactly like 7200.10 seagate drives. In the box it also have a piece of paper explaining that the drive have a 3 year warranty.

I hate maxtors and I am glad that this one is made by seagate.




By TomZ on 11/29/2006 8:37:26 AM , Rating: 2
I've got dozens of WDC hard drives in service here, many of them SATA, without any problems. I think Maxtor just didn't focus on quality and reliability enough.


By therealnickdanger on 11/29/2006 8:37:28 AM , Rating: 2
Throughout the life of all the computer systems I've owned, the majority of my drives have been Maxtor and I've NEVER had one die on me. I've still got a 4200RPM 8GB Maxtor kicking around... I've also had a couple WDs, WD Raptors - again with no issues. I never experienced my first drive failure until just recently with the purchase of a Seagate 7200.9, it only lasted five days and its replacement only lasted for two. Based solely on my own experience, I saw the takeover of Maxtor by Seagate as a negative.


By Wwhat on 11/29/2006 12:25:05 PM , Rating: 1
Uhm, you are still on retainer to post lies like that in comments? even though maxtor was sold? strange


By angryhippy on 11/29/2006 4:04:41 PM , Rating: 2
"Uhm, you are still on retainer to post lies like that in comments? even though maxtor was sold? strange"

I've had mostly Maxtor drives the last 8 years too, with one or two WD drives, and I've yet to have any hard drive fail on me. It must just be luck of the draw. I have noticed a lot of failure complaints for newer Maxtors on Newegg's product ratings though. Too bad, they're pretty fast for budget drives. I think my next HD will be a WD Raptor though, according to all reviews I've they smoke everything but the fastest SCSI drives.


By mindless1 on 11/29/2006 5:01:05 PM , Rating: 2
Most end users haven't had enough drives to experience any Maxtor failures, because the failure rate isn't all that high as some pretend. There are millions of aged OEM systems running Maxtor drives fine.

I've had some Maxtor failures, and Seagate, Samsung, etc. There weren't any particularly problematic Maxtor drives since the first-gen 7K2 model.


By Araemo on 11/29/2006 8:42:42 AM , Rating: 3
The reason Maxtor made quality SCSI drives is because they bought Quantum - the highest quality SCSI manufacturer that you could afford. :P


By Araemo on 11/29/2006 8:43:48 AM , Rating: 2
As for reliable 100GB/$80... that's actually rather expensive for a 100GB drive now. I just bought two seagate 250GB drives for $75 each. ;)

And that's with 5 year warranties. They're in RAID 1, so if one dies, I just get it replaced and swap it out.


By Meaker10 on 11/29/2006 8:02:14 PM , Rating: 2
The chances of one drive failing and the other one failing while you have a single HDD are very small. The whole point is that you can use the working one while the other is replaced, then slot it back in and have protection again.


By MrCoyote on 11/29/2006 10:29:16 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
Does anyone really think that you can deliver a reliable 100 Gig. HD for $80.00? If so you're just kidding yourself.

Yes because MACHINES make the product. They are not assembled by humans. It does not matter whether the platter has 300GB or 20MB, the quality will be the same once the machine assembles it.


By Wwhat on 11/29/2006 12:30:11 PM , Rating: 2
That's nonsense, the drive gets more complex and cramped with growing capacity, you need finer readheads, you need a better and purer substrate and you need more and more discs that create more heat and require a more powerful motor to rotate them and a better heat dissipation.
All of which if not taken proper consideration for will make it unreliable.



By TomZ on 11/29/2006 3:13:21 PM , Rating: 2
I have not seen any statistical nor anecdotal correlation between larger-capacity hard drives and reliability - have you?

I would guess other quality issues dominate, rather than it being simply a "bigger drive" issue, since the quality issues seem in some cases random (to we consumers) and also to run along with brands (e.g., Quantum and IBM in the 1990s, Maxtor in the past 5-10 years).


By Wwhat on 11/29/2006 6:26:10 PM , Rating: 2
See, there's your mistake, using statistical data, take the IBM thing, their drives failed due to a specific designflaw and so they spike the statistics, you can not take statistics that are broad as evidence unless you compensate for issues that pollute those statistics towards something unrelated to what you are trying to discover.



By TomZ on 11/29/2006 11:36:08 PM , Rating: 2
Huh? :o)


"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007









botimage
Copyright 2013 DailyTech LLC. - RSS Feed | Advertise | About Us | Ethics | FAQ | Terms, Conditions & Privacy Information | Kristopher Kubicki