Not Just Diebold That Has Weak Voting Machine Security

Seagate And Maxtor Decide To Store Stuff Together

from the more-storage dept

Wed, Dec 21st 2005 10:18am — Mike Masnick

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.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

15 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

DittoBox, 21 Dec 2005 @ 11:33am

I hope quality gets better...
I don't know about anyone else but I've never seen a maxtor drive last more than 2 years. Seagate and WD are the only HDD manufacterers I'll ever buy a drive from, all of my maxtor drives have died on me, even where my bro works they had maxtor drives in a production server with raid, one drive was maxtor and went out this last month. Of course it was easy to replace since it's raid but that's still scary.

Let's hope that Seagate cleans up maxtor.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 21 Dec 2005 @ 11:42am

Seagate/Maxtor
On the consumer/retail level, Seagate's product often seem to be considerably more expensive than Maxtor. Hopefully those low-margin products won't disappear after the acquisition.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 21 Dec 2005 @ 11:44am

Re: I hope quality gets better...
Maxtor will disappear after the acquisition, products will be under the Seagate name. (according to the press release)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Rut, 21 Dec 2005 @ 12:08pm

Re: I hope quality gets better...
I've personally always been impressed with Maxtor's adoption of ATA-133, while everyone else stayed at ATA-100. In the current days of SATA, this is irrelevant, but still--I've always made a point of buying Maxtor drives, and I've always been pleased with them.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 21 Dec 2005 @ 12:22pm

Re: I hope quality gets better...
All hard drives fail. Back up your shit.

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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Ben, 21 Dec 2005 @ 12:24pm

Maxtor
It seems the recently Maxtor has made it more difficult to return defective hard drives. Consumers have to have a code generated by a Maxtor application that is run to determine if a hard drive is defective or not. It involves booting from a floppy drive. I don't know the rest because my Maxtor drive, apparently with an intermittent problem, started working again. I wasn't able to return it but I was able to return the new Maxtor drive that I hadn't opened yet. In the meantime Western Digital continues to cross ship replacements without a hassle. If Maxtor gave any contact information to deal with problems such as the ones I've had over the past months, it would be a different story. I don't think I want to deal with the Maxtor problems when I can't have line of communication with a tech person.

[ link to this | view in thread ]
Jerry H., 21 Dec 2005 @ 12:48pm

Re: I hope quality gets better...
Wow, I don't know what to say to that...I've been buying Maxtor for the past ten years for RAID and non-RAID use and have never, ever had one fail!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Joe Schmoe, 21 Dec 2005 @ 1:02pm

Re: I hope quality gets better...
Maxtor been good to me...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Tim Kastelein, 23 Sep 2006 @ 9:29pm

There IS a difference between Maxtor and other dri
While it is true that every hard drive WILL fail, the rate at which Maxtor drives fail is shameful. I have been a computer technician and look at literally 1000+ computers a year and I can tell you hands down that Maxtor Drives manufactured in the last 4 years (even before that with their "slim" 3 1/2 inch drives) are absolute junk. We sold many of them and almost ALL of them came back. I actually liked Maxtor and bought 6 250GB SATA drives for three systems I was building for home. Guess what? They ALL failed between 3-7 months of use. Every single one of them. I returned them to Newegg and demanded they replace them with Western Digital drives. They have been running for about a year and a half with NO problems in ANY of them. All of Maxtors "thin" 3 1/2 inch drives failed within 2 years. We bought 3 external backup drives that were Maxtor and they ALL failed in less than 9 months. EVERY ONE!!! They have SERIOUS quality control issues. I see an occasional WD or Seagate or Hitachi drive failure and even some premature failures, but the rate at which the Maxtor drives fail is much much much much much much much greater. The only thing Maxtor outscores the competition at is failing. They have not manufactured anything for a while that anyone should trust. There is a reason their warranties were knocked down to 1 year while their competition's was at 3 and even at 5! As Tommy Boy stated, "I can take a dump in a paper bag and but a 'guarantee' label on it if you want" I just can't say enough bad things about this company as of late and their obvious quality control and manufacture problems. I am assuming that their slew of defective junk is why they are being bought up.... and I don't blame Seagate for not using their name and absorbing their assets. After doing another feeble data recovery on ANOTHER 8 month old Maxtor drive today I actually found this site by typing "Maxtor is junk" in Google.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Matt, 19 Nov 2006 @ 3:27pm

I agree with Tim
Being a computer technician, I also have had to deal with a lot of broken hard drives. 9 out of ten have been Maxtor !
Personaly I would never purchase one.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Michael Walton, 29 Nov 2006 @ 6:56am

Seagate - Maxtor pushes customers away
It seems from my company's recent dealings with Seagate – Maxtor customer support that Seagate does not want to do business with companies who have in the past bought Maxtor drives. The reason that I say that is as follows.

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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Nick, 28 Jan 2007 @ 10:15am

WD Sucks in my experience
In the end they are all the same, but my personal experience is all HD I ever had fail for my use at home were all WD. As far as work we use all Seagate, and never had one fail to date. I only use Maxtor at home now. They had a bad rap in early days as being nosiy, but they had since fixed that problem. WD good for replacement policy, but still I personally will never trust them for any length of time to not fail.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Greg, 3 Jul 2007 @ 12:17am

Maxtor blows
I own a video game cafe. We opened with 20 pc's, all identical with 80gb maxtor drives. By the end of 1 year we had 12 of the 20 drives fails. By the end of the second year, 19 of our original 20 had died. In 2 years maxtors had a 95% failure rate. We are now 3 years old. All of our replacements are WD, none have died yet.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Jeff Bizos, 28 Nov 2008 @ 11:51pm

Maxtor
Please for the love of God and Jesus and Mohammad and whoever you believe in please do not buy a Maxtor drive. Please pay the extra $10 and get a drive that will last a LOT longer. Maxtor is a horrible manufacturer or drives. The new Seageate drives (which recently absorbed Maxtor) is a great drive!
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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Joe broe, 28 Nov 2009 @ 7:03am

Re: I hope quality gets better...
I've been using Maxtor for years. Never had a problem with them. The PC I'm using right now has a 6 (six) year old Maxtor hard drive that is still going strong. This PC is turned on at least 10 hours a day. On the other hand, every Seagate I've ever bought has died within a year or two, even on lightly used PCs. Western Digital slightly better than Seagate. Sad to see Seagate is buying Maxtor - I hope Seagate utilizes Maxtor's technology to improve Seagate drives.
[ link to this | view in thread ]