You may want to check out Warranty Week on the Top 25 Warranty Providers, and you'll notice that Maxtor is in the list. As for Seagate, they are in the Top 50 Warranty Providers instead because of lower warranty claims. It should be noted Seagate ships more drive than Maxtor, however on warranty claims its the other way around though. These figures are mostly for the US/Canada region though.. Sorry, no figures on Western Digital this year YET, but you can checkout the older Warranty Headlines Archive and see..

The figures there are subjective of course. There could be many factors that affect them (such as older warranties due to 3-5 year warranty claims, etc). Just some points to ponder..

On the subject on reliability.. I would say 80% on how you manage and "treat" them (ie. PSU, cooling, mounting, etc) and 20% luck! Nobody's perfect.

Always monitor the S.M.A.R.T status from time to time to avoid data loss.. Do periodic backups as well..

This post has been edited by lex: Dec 16 2005, 12:41 PM

Hear ye! Hear ye! This just in (though I'm not surprised at all considering Maxtor current financial situation)

• Seagate Technology to Acquire Maxtor Corporation
  
• Seagate agrees to buy Maxtor for $1.9 bln - WSJ
  
• Seagate Reaches $1.9 Billion Deal To Buy Hard-Disk Rival Maxtor

Once upon a time, Maxtor gobbled up Quantum, and now Seagate takes over Maxtor. I wonder if the SeaCare centers will now cater for Maxtor RMAs as well..

That's one of the reasons I have (lots of) external USB drives ready. To BACKUP QUICKLY whenever one of the HDDs having SMART failure, showing weird symptoms or having problems. I can always burn the data to DVDRs and/or CDRs later (for permanent backup).

Reason? Burning hundred GBs of data to DVDRs and/or CDRs takes lots of time. Always have a good backup plan handy.

Regards.

Backup to media like CDR and/or DVDR takes long time, in particular if having hundreds of GBs would take from hours to days. When the drive is starting to exhibit problems, recommended to copy the data off that drive quickly because it may fail anytime soon. In this case, redundancy is essential to avoid sudden data loss. Once there is redundancy, you can take your own sweet time to completely backup and/or burn to CDR and/or DVDR.

This post has been edited by lex: Jan 20 2006, 05:49 PM

Hmm.. Do you know WHY IBM sold their HDD business (back) to Hitachi? Have you heard of the DeskStar 75GXP.. AKA the DeathStar?

Check out IBM Deskstar 75GXP Class Action Website. And FYI, Fujitsu also had a class action suit resulting in exit from the desktop market. See HDD Class Action Settlement Website.

This post has been edited by lex: Feb 21 2006, 12:08 PM

Old news already. In fact a thread on "Seagate To Buy Maxtor" was posted here back in December 26, 2005... on the same day the news was announced.

NOTICE

I have noticed quite a number of people bought "Maxtor QuickView" drives for use with their desktop PCs (and/or for external data storage). Please beware that these drives are NOT meant for proper data storage purposes! Please check the following statement in BOLD RED (source: Maxtor QuickView Hard Drives - Built for your DVR, PVR and Consumer Electronics Devices): FYI: These "QuickView" drives are based on DiamonadMax 10 desktop drives. Regards.

Means that Maxtor QuickView drive will "skip" or drop data from slow sectors or from sectors that contains errors (will NOT retry re-reading the sector). Thus, there may be "gaps" in the data read back..

FYI: Normal desktop HDDs wil retry reading slow sectors and/or sectors with errors to ensure the data is available. If the sector could not be read (or found), then it will report an error (such as "cyclic redundancy error" or "bad block") instead of skipping it..

Just a bit of news. Seagate has fully taken over Maxtor.

Official: Seagate Technology - SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY COMPLETES ACQUISITION OF MAXTOR CORPORATION

Other news sites:

- The Register - Seagate swallows Maxtor
- RealTech News -Seagate Buys Maxtor
- Macworld Daily News - Seagate, Maxtor merge approved
ZDNet - Shareholders clear Seagate's Maxtor takeover
..etc..

Regards.