Sponsored Links

Advice with maxtor hard drive

rruwalton

ISP Rep
I would appreciate some helpful advice on the following please:

My pc has 3 x 80gig hard drives and whilst cleaning up and transferring some files from one of these drives yesterday it stopped reading, providing me with an error message "corrupt data".

Anyway I had 20 films on the drive, so I gave it a quick format (this allowed me to read the drive again) and I then used 'Recover My Files'. This is working fine and I am pulling back the files - although it's a lengthy process!

What I would like is some comments on whether the drive is on its way out or whether this incident may have been a one off problem? If so, I can do a full format once I have the files recovered and then use it again for storage.

Thank you
 
You could try speedfan, its designed to give you readings from your cpu temp etc, but also preforms a small diag on the hard drives and tells you if they are likly to fail.
 
Sponsored Links
I know this won't help, but anybody thinking about buying a new HD should just plain avoid Maxtor. The only HD's I've ever had a real problem with have been Maxtor's. Even friends and friends of friends have had problems and the first thing I ask tends to be "Is it a Maxtor?", the answer is usually yes.

Terrible drives, I tend to go with Western Digital and the odd Seagate instead - never had any problems with WD. I believe that the biggest fault with Maxtor is that its drives run hot and are also not very resilient to this, so the components eventually wear down until a fault occurs.
 
Mark I have to disagree with you. I have two maxtor drives and I have friends who also have maxtor drives, none of us have ever had a problem with them.
 
Hello Richard

Do exactly as suggested by Butler – and hopefully the fault may have been a one off occurrence.

Should you keep experiencing problems with the drive and the warranty has expired, can I suggest you consider trying a program called ‘HDD Regenerator’ on the drive.
I’ve used it as the last resort on two drives which refused to function and the last I knew they were still working okay at least two years after regeneratoring them.

Some info on the program is at:
http://www.abstradrome.com/hdd.html

A few words of caution however.
Only use the program if all else fails and the drives become too unreliable to use.
It can take an awfully long time for the program to try and fix the drive.
I think the program costs around the price of a new drive if you were to consider buying a legit copy. ;)

Good luck

Oh, and I tend to agree with Mark regarding the quality of Maxtor drives.
Once again, I’m in the process of exchanging a 80 gig drive with them for a failed unit that is only 6 months old.
(Mind you, I did buy it from Comets who wrongly priced it up manually at £14.99 - new, and fully sealed)
 
I would agree with the comments regarding Maxtor drives, they seem to be the only ones that are constantly getting bad customer feedback reviews.

I had one fail at 11 months, never had a problem with W.D or Seagate's.
 
Sponsored Links
Had two maxtors, both still working fine. All my friends are the same. However i be wary of recomending them after hearing other peoples problems
 
5 maxtor's in this machine, only ever bought maxtor. Unfortunately they were recently bought by Seagate, who imo suck. No drive in this machine above 35 degrees. Although ive gone to a good length to ensure this.

Might be worth doing a 24 hr memtest on your ram to ensure its not the cause of the problem. www.memtest.org . Or, if you have a DFI board (like me), its built into the bios, very handy :D

IDE disks are different from SCSI in the fact that they keep a certain amount of sectors reserved to replace bad sectors (or at least they used to!). So, if you format your machine and it says "0 bad sectors" then it just actually means the reserve sectors arent all used yet. If an IDE disk starts developing bad sectors....back it up quickly :P

And FYI, Maxtor certainly arent the worst hard disk company. What about the not so long ago IBM disastor using glass platters? Pixie dust....Drives last about 6 months if they are left on 24 hrs a day. Glass platters...a great technology, just needs to be made stable before its released to the masses.
 
Mark.J said:
I know this won't help, but anybody thinking about buying a new HD should just plain avoid Maxtor. The only HD's I've ever had a real problem with have been Maxtor's. Even friends and friends of friends have had problems and the first thing I ask tends to be "Is it a Maxtor?", the answer is usually yes.

Terrible drives, I tend to go with Western Digital and the odd Seagate instead - never had any problems with WD. I believe that the biggest fault with Maxtor is that its drives run hot and are also not very resilient to this, so the components eventually wear down until a fault occurs.

I agree. Problem is they are so cheap :D.

Had a lot of problems with NTLDR errors with this drive make. Solution: Dont move any files on it from an xp backup, or move a large amout of files to it at the very beginning. Apparently it wipes the beginning of the hard drive leading to problems. It doesnt seem to like it.
 
Sponsored Links
Darkspark said:
I agree. Problem is they are so cheap :D.

Had a lot of problems with NTLDR errors with this drive make. Solution: Dont move any files on it from an xp backup, or move a large amout of files to it at the very beginning. Apparently it wipes the beginning of the hard drive leading to problems. It doesnt seem to like it.

Yep, had that problem too =).

I'm no big fan of IBM either.
 
I find that the ATA133 varients of the maxtor drives run hot and I find the start of the problems is when they start clicking quite noticably,to me, thats a sign to back up and then to $00 fill the drive using maxblast {takes about 8 hours :eek:} I find the best way to prevent this in my experience is to run the drives slower (set it to run ATA66 (mode 4?)) and problems like this dont seem to happen, the newer SATA drives (I have 2x200GB versions) dont seem to suffer from this problem to my knowledge thankfully..
 
rruwalton said:
...What I would like is some comments on whether the drive is on its way out or whether this incident may have been a one off problem? If so, I can do a full format once I have the files recovered and then use it again for storage. ...


Since nobody has mentioned S.M.A.R.T. directly, I will - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis_and_Reporting_Technology . There are some free software links at the bottom of the page.

If you have the slightest doubt about the drive then dump it, or claim under warranty - high capacity hard drives cost peanuts nowadays (even a thrifty Yorkshireman would buy one ! ;) ). :hrmph:
 
Copied some stuff over to the drive and tried copying it back. It struggles to do this.

I was going to try the file butler suggested but I have no floppy disks.
 
Sponsored Links
The floppy disk ver. of software didnt work for me. Use the CD version.
 
Top
Cheap BIG ISPs for 100Mbps+
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Virgin Media UK ISP Logo
Virgin Media £22.99
132Mbps
Gift: None
Vodafone UK ISP Logo
Vodafone £24.00 - 26.00
150Mbps
Gift: None
NOW UK ISP Logo
NOW £24.00
100Mbps
Gift: None
Plusnet UK ISP Logo
Plusnet £25.99
145Mbps
Gift: £50 Reward Card
Large Availability | View All
Cheapest ISPs for 100Mbps+
Gigaclear UK ISP Logo
Gigaclear £17.00
200Mbps
Gift: None
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Virgin Media UK ISP Logo
Virgin Media £22.99
132Mbps
Gift: None
Hey! Broadband UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Youfibre UK ISP Logo
Youfibre £23.99
150Mbps
Gift: None
Large Availability | View All
Sponsored Links
The Top 15 Category Tags
  1. FTTP (6026)
  2. BT (3639)
  3. Politics (2721)
  4. Business (2439)
  5. Openreach (2405)
  6. Building Digital UK (2330)
  7. Mobile Broadband (2146)
  8. FTTC (2083)
  9. Statistics (1901)
  10. 4G (1816)
  11. Virgin Media (1764)
  12. Ofcom Regulation (1582)
  13. Fibre Optic (1467)
  14. Wireless Internet (1462)
  15. 5G (1407)
Sponsored

Copyright © 1999 to Present - ISPreview.co.uk - All Rights Reserved - Terms  ,  Privacy and Cookie Policy  ,  Links  ,  Website Rules