Seagate And Maxtor Decide To Store Stuff Together
from the more-storage dept
We've joked in the past about how the storage business tends to be considered fairly boring in the tech world, so it's tough to come up with too much that's interesting to say about Seagate buying Maxtor for $1.9 billion other than the fact that we weren't totally sure they had been separate to begin with (it's a joke, people). All the various storage companies seem to blend together in our minds, and now they're doing that in real life too -- which hopefully makes it easier to keep track of them.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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I hope quality gets better...
Let's hope that Seagate cleans up maxtor.
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Re: I hope quality gets better...
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Re: I hope quality gets better...
All the companies are the same as far as I'm concerned. There's just as good a chance at buying a WD or Seagate HD that fails only after a couple years as there is a Maxtor drive. If you are unlucky, you'll get a bum drive.
Just for the record, the only HD I've ever had fail on me was a WD. And I am still using a 4 year old 40 gig Maxtor with zero problems to date.
We all have bad experiences. It doesn't mean there's a need to shun a company when the simple fact remains that mechanical technology ALWAYS FAILS.
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Seagate/Maxtor
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Maxtor
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There IS a difference between Maxtor and other dri
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I agree with Tim
Personaly I would never purchase one.
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Seagate - Maxtor pushes customers away
Our company has bout hundreds of Maxtor drives in the past. Two month ago we bought 14 Maxtor drives from our supplier. They all failed in RAID configuration. We tried to return them to our supplier but we were told that Seagate – Maxtor has a new policy and that we must deal with them directly for any problems with their hard drives. Here is a summary by our engineer David who dealt with Seagate – Maxtor customer support on the problem.
As requested here is a history of the problems we had with the Maxtor hard disks (DiamondMax 10 160GB SATA II):
Problem: The disks timeout or disappear from raid array regularly and that happens on 3 different controllers: 3ware 9500S 4LP, RocketRaid1820 and Intel ICH8 on Motherboard ASUS P5B-Deluxe (SATA2). We have tried all configurations possible; tried with the SATA150 jumper on and off, it was always the same problem. We did the same tests with WD hard disks, which worked perfect… no problem at all.
- - I contacted Seagate - Maxtor support about this, they admitted these disks should work on RAID (nothing on Maxtor website say those hardisks aren’t suitable for RAID). I talked to their technician about the problem; he told me that he has seen this problem before. I then talked to the customer support and requested a replacement with another model. She had to talk to her supervisor.
- - They said they could replace the disks, but first we would have to send them detailed information about the disks and the problem, which I did.
- - After a few days I had no reply from them so I resent the information.
- - Still no reply from them, I called them. They said they didn’t get the requested information, I said we sent twice, then they found it and said “they didn’t see it”.
- - After talking to the supervisor, they proposed to replace the disks with MaxLine model, but that they require the supervisor agreement first.
- - They called back and said that the MaxLine Hard disks were based on the same electronic as DiamondMax10 and we would have probably the same problem they asked me to talk to a technician for a possible firmware problem.
- - The technician said our hard disks use an old firmware (VA111630) and that there is a newer firmware (VA111690) that fix the kind of issue we were having. He sent an email and asked us to flash the drives.
- - I flashed each drive, and tested them… it seems that the RAID timeout problem is solved… however the disks are now extremely slow for writing! After flashing to the new firmware the write speed dropped from around 40/50MB/s to 8MB/s !!!! and in raid configuration it’s even worst: 2MB/s! I first thought it was an issue with the raid controller, so I tried on another one (SATA2) and it was exactly the same problem… Then I tested with WD harddisks, they worked fast and fine. I also tested those drives standalone (no raid), the write speed is also around 8MB/s. It is impossible for us to work with those disks anymore…
- - I called Seagate - Maxtor support about it, they “lost” all the information attached to the case ID, I had to talk with a different technician who was quite rude and requested us to send all information again… After sending the information, he asks us to test the disks again with their Powermax tool all over again… and even said, “maybe those disks don’t support RAID?”. The problem is not raid anymore; it is the writing speed with their new firmware. They don’t talk about replacement anymore; we are back to where we started with them…
We have given up with Seagate – Maxtor and are now trying to work with our supplier who will take them back and give us Western Digital drives as a replacement. We explained everything to them. They have three other customers who have had the same problem. Our supplier asked if we could put the original firmware on the drives so David asked Seagate - Maxtor support to send the original firmware so that we could put the drives back to the same firmware that they came with and which is indicated on the label. They refused to send it so we found it on the NET and have reloaded it. It seems to me that they are doing whatever they can to force the customer to finally give up throw defective disks away and go to another supplier.
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WD Sucks in my experience
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Maxtor blows
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Maxtor
You can definitely tell the (Maxtor) drives they absorbed though. Seagate has the fairest return policy in the business, but if they offer a (Maxtor) drive offered up to you as a unbranded Maxtor drive watch out!
Maxtor should get a horrible illness and have it's collective face fall off from facial cancer. I hate you Maxtor... Get prostrate, liver, and kidney cancer, stand up look at yourself and then Rott in hell. Corrupt, evil, blood-sucking assholes... I hate you.
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