Hard Drive

[Scarecrow Man]

Stats:

Fairly new, less than 2 years.

Maxtor 6Y200P0, 200GB

Slave on a WinXP system

Problem is, when it works, it causes so many other problems. For example, when a user logs off, the screen goes black and the computer is frozen.

The main problem is, it is either detected impropery by the bios as mjxtar x600 or nxjor p200 or similar things. Other times it is detected as a blank drive, and the bios reports: primary slave failed. Other times I get not detected and windows boots fine, but there are no drives in windows (obviously)

Is there anything I can do?

[Scarecrow Man]

Well its under warrenty (Thanks Maxtor! :) ), but I don't think it's dead. The odd time it works, it has all of my backed up movies right now. I don't care about losing them because I have the originals, but it's a pain to loose 200GB for 6 to 8 weeks :(

This is the second drive I've sent back to Maxtor. Let's hope it was as easy as the last time. They seemed quite good about it before.

[madboy33]

Try putting both drives on "Cable Select" (CS)

[andsome]

I had a three year old Maxtor pack up without warning.

[-pops-]

I've installed hundreds of Maxtor drives and never had a problem with reliability - until now.

Three drives I put into machines about a year ago are showing definite signs of failure such that I am removing them and sending back for examination.

I am very disappointed with the apparent lowering of quality of this brand - I've heard other reports of them being less good than they were and I am seriously thinking about moving to Western Digital for my drives for future builds.

[andsome]

My current hard drives are listed in Everest as,

Device Description

HDS728080PLAT20 (PFD212S2TXKTSN)

and

Device Description

Maxtor 6E040L0 (E1TYNZ0E)

One as you can see is still a Maxtor. Any opinion on the other one?

[-pops-]

Your HDS728080PLAT20 is a Hitachi Deskstar. These were associated with IBM drives (can't remember how) but they acquired a very poor reputation for reliability.

The modern ones are much improved after some manufacturing modification.

I am reluctant to give an opinion now my faith in Maxtor is withering.

[andsome]

I'll keep an eye on things.

[-pops-]

You may well find, andsome, that because of the rubbish drives they did produce that the more modern ones are super good.

[CurlyWhirly]

I've heard other reports of them being less good than they were and I am seriously thinking about moving to Western Digital for my drives for future builds.

I am now using the same Western Digital drive that I had when I first bought this PC around 4 years ago and it is still going strong after nearly 10,000 hours of use according to the SMART utility.

[-pops-]

CurlyWhirly

That's how I found Maxtors to be in the past but not any more, it seems.

[Scarecrow Man]

My other drive is also a Maxtor 40GB. going on 50,000+ hours. No problems.

I find Maxtor to be quality products. And any drive that I have had fail has been under warranty. I had one western digital drive fail, and I just ignored it for a while, until realizing I could check the warranty on line. I was sad to find out I was 1 month late, considering I had left the drive sit for 3 months :(

[DavisMcCarn]

There is a dirty little secret being hidden by the manufacturers and that is that every one of them has released defective designs. What is disgusting (IMHO) is that some (WD and Maxtor) haven't corrected it in over four years, won't generally acknowledge the defect, and the failure mode is almost universally sudden and catastrophic.

The common root problem is defects in the firmware and corruption of the management data stored on the media.

Maxtor's with fluid bearings, as an example, suffer from a wobbling of the platters which causes the onboard processor to suddenly think is has a flood of new "grown defects". It, then, flails away, trying to remap them to good media and corrupts the "GLIST" (Grown Defect List) stored on the media. Suddenly, the drive reports as it's cryptic model series (N40P, Athena, etc) or not at all and, most often, reports every sector as bad

Another Maxtor series runs too hot and erodes the media by cooking it; also trashing the control data on that media and going POOF. WD's just plain corrupt the controllers data kept on the media, then go click-click-click and are gone. "Deathstars" parked the heads over the area used for media management, eventually chewing it up (brilliant htinking, huh?).

We used to regularly swap head assemblies between identical drives as the last resort and had an almost 90% success rate with this technique UNTIL these new problems arose. Now, you can swap the heads and the good drive stays goo, the bad drive is still bad.

It should also be noted that WD, Maxtor, etc. could easilly write a utility that either rewrote the corrupted firmware/management data or disabled the controllers use of it. Either one would let you clone the drive and get your data back.

As it stands, now, OnTrack (don't even get me started), Drivesavers, and the like have either paid the manufcturers for the details (conspiracy anyone?) or reverse engineered fixes so they can charge you $6,000 to get it back. Or, if you have $10,000 for a PC3000 and about six months to figure it out, you could do it yourself.

HDTune ( http://www.hdtune.com ) will let you view the SMART attributes and do an error scan. If there is even one bad sector, the drive is on it's way out and it is a crisis if you care about the data.

Seagate seems to have fixed their issues and offers a 5 year warranty. Hitachi does, too, and Samsung's are OK as near as I have been able to determine.

P.S. In another forum, the user had 29, 3 month old, Dell's with Maxtor 80's. One of the was BSODing up a storm. HDTune found that 6 of the 29 drives were failing.

[Scarecrow Man]

Strange. I left the drive out of my computer for 3 days, put it back in and now all is well.

I am currently backing up all data from it, and will send it in to Maxtor for a replacement.

Thanks for the info Davis.

[Scarecrow Man]

Here's an example of what is going on.

This is after removing the drive for 3 days. This pic shows one of the partitions, which contained my backed up dvd's. I am currently backing up all data from the other partition, which is still intact.