On 08 May 2007 01:09:10 GMT, Pecos
<anortRemOveThIs&2on21@mindspring.com> wrote:

>Please read this article if you are in the market for a Maxtor DiamondMax
>hard drive. My experience was with the 6L250S0 DiamondMax 10 SATA I 250GB
>model, but may also apply to other DiamondMax series drives.
>
>Read the whole article:
>http://www.mindspring.com/~anorton1/..._Identity.html
>
>Cut to the chase:
>http://www.mindspring.com/
>~anorton1/A_Case_of_Maxtaken_Identity.html#NotHardDrive
>
>Alan Norton
>Reviews: ABIT AN8 SLI, ECS P965T-A & Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H Mb's
>Choosing the Right Version Of Vista - Vista Confusion Article
>Arizona Pics and Cute Animal Pics
>http://www.mindspring.com/~anorton1/


1) Everyone hates popups.

2) Beware of "Open Box", it's cheaper for a reason. Some
items, if they work 100% when received are a deal, others
are not.

3) You lose credibility for running Vista on any serious
system use. It's still a beta, DRM laden, toy OS.

4) You lose credibilty for putting the OS on a striped
volume, as the OS does not need higher througput, it needs
lower latency if anything. A Raid0 array of same drives
won't give you that.

5) I don't feel you "learned the hard way to export my
EMails occasionally" because the prudent measure is a full
backup of the array volume, not just one select set of
files. This is reasonable with a single drive but even more
important when a RAID0 increase chances of loss. While I
realize you wanted more performance, if you ignore the risks
you are gambling with any drive, let alone a refurbed set
used for RAID0.

6) "RAID arrays can be very particular about the type of
hard drives you mix and match" is false. You could random
buy any drive of same or higher actual capacity (if they
round off "250GB", some might be slightly too small if still
selling as "250GB" but any equal or larger would suffice.

7) "Open box" is just a category, a catch-all for anything
that is not brand new, untouched merchandise. It is
unfortunate you didn't realize the difference, and "maybe"
some blame can be placed on Newegg if they didn't
prominently display notification of this, but in the end it
is buyer beware when not buying normal, new stock items.

8) For future reference, they don't open boxes for no
reason. ALL of the "open box" items have been already
diverted from regular new/retail stock for some kind of
reason. I'm not necessarily faulting your
misinterpretation, but for future reference, they have no
reason to open a new product (thus devaluing it), these
items are subject to an uncertainty factor, a gamble in what
you receive. FWIW, I have bought refurb'd (the newegg
category used to be called refurbished instead of open box)
that continue to work fine over 2 years later (a hard drive)
but I've also bought refurb'd that had faults and had to be
returned promptly. IMO, the key is you have to beware that
there may be a problem and vigorously test an item, and with
HDDs, never get a refurb for any important data storage.

9) If the data is important, dont use a motherboard
integral raid controller for anything except RAID1.
Otherwise, if the board fails (which is, IMO, significantly
more likely than having a seperate card fail) you are stuck
having to buy a board with same RAID chipset to use that
array. If you have a seperate backup of it, proven working,
it is much less important, but personally I prefer a PCI
card even accepting the penalty of running one from PCI bus,
just so it is removable, and I also buy a 2nd card, same
chipset, for any array that holds important data.

10) A large part of your problem was the basic
misunderstanding that you needed to get an indentical drive.
You didn't, could have instead bought any 250GB drive, and
if it happened to be slightly smaller, copied the data onto
it first, then defined it as a member of a new array, then
after confirming data intact, take the other original drive
and delete the array it was in (different array) and assign
it as a member of the other newer array the new drive with
the data, is in. It might not even be necessary to do this,
if the new drive is at least as large in true (stated on
label) capacity.

11) SATA2 supports NQC. But it doesn't matter. You only
needed two drives supported by the controller to get the
array working. That includes SATA(1) drives that don't
support NCQ.

12) While your webpage was informative as some detailed
information about your situation and the cusotomer support
you received, it isn't necessarily the kind of information
that is as useful as a guide or review as a warning "don't
do this".

Especially with moderate sized drives, today it's as well to
buy whatever is on sale or has a rebate unless you're
shooting for highest performance with a certain model.
Certainly a Maxtor 250GB Diamondmax 10 isn't one of those
models.

I didn't mean to be harsh above, I do have sympathy for
your situation, but it seems that by a few questionable
choices combined with bad luck, your result is worse than
most will achieve.