Kudos to Maxtor

Leonardo

Last Sunday I had a one of my Maxtor drives (Diamond Max 9) give up the ghost in my system 1 rig. After thorough testing, I determined it was beyond hope. I did everything by the book, including trying to run Maxtor's diagnostics. Regardless of the cable attached or IDE port the disk was attached to, it would not detect by the BIOS or Windows.

Monday morning I registered for RMA with Maxtor at their Internet site. I selected the Advanced Replacement option whereby Maxtor ships a replacement before they receive the troubled disk. Worked perfectly. My replacement hard drive arrived Friday morning. Friday evening, after partitioning and formattion, the drive works perfectly.

Some of you may think this is - 'so what', just an RMA. Well, I've never had to RMA a hard drive before. I was impressed with the quick turnaround from Maxtor. (BTW, since my Packard Bell's no-name drives in 1995, this is the first hard drives I've lost.)

WuGgaRoO

ive lost many of maxtors to the deadly clicking

Geeky1

You guys are scaring me. I've got 8 Diamond Max 9s...

I haven't dealt with Maxtor's tech support, but IBM's support for their SCSI drives (when they were making drives) was excellent.

Leonardo

This drive didn't click before death. According to my son (I wasn't home at the time), the drive started warbling. He wasn't at the computer itself, but did not notice any clicking. When I diagnosed the drive, I was unable to get it to detect in the BIOS, but at a certain point in every boot, it would indeed start warbling. Interesting.

godzilla525

wow... warbling, eh? My DM+ 45 7200 is slowly approaching 3 years nonstop (worn ball bearings = screaming Boeing 747)

I sometimes wonder if FDB bearings are all they're cracked up to be. (sorry for using cracked and bearing in the same sentence) I would imagine they have to use a really thin lubricant with such tight tolerances. I wonder what it is and if it's prone to evaporation or migration.

Ball bearings usually use a thicker grease which stays put.

there have been a couple of times mine had to retry spinning up which scared me to death, but no warbling....though I have heard that often when Maxtors go south it's the spindle motor controller.

One thing I always liked about Maxtor was their Advance Replacement policy. Fortunately I've never had to use it. IBM/Hitachi has no such policy IIRC (even though they sorely needed it for 60/75GXP), at least for their IDE units.

Leonardo

The warbling sound was electronically produced. There is some type of electronic emitter (tiny speaker?) in/on the hard drive that makes the sound. Neither my son nor I ever heard a mechanical sound when this drive went down.

Thrax

My old DiamondMax 40GB model, and I cannot even remember what kind it was, bit the dust after issuing the Maxtor version of IBM's click of death. Lasted five long years of very thorough use, and it was noisy. I loved that thing.

Kudos indeed. Their advanced replacement RMA process saved me a LOT of time, as the 40 was once the only drive in my PC.

godzilla525

Come to think of it, I have had bad drives make a beeping noise at me when they don't spin up...My Maxtor did it once and my (replaced by Dell) Travelstar did it a lot on it's way out. The beeping came through so clear I could swear it was the PC speaker if I didn't know better. I have a feeling that the spindle motor does that... perhaps drive manufacurers do something attention-getting on purpose to alert the user of a serious problem, however I've never seen a drive with an actual beeper or speaker on it.

one of these days I'm going to try to record the 'normal' noises my replacement Travelstar makes (aside from the usual offramp-park *clink*) and see if it scares anyone else.