WD My Book Questions / Maxtor One Touch Drives (Not Positive)

I am finally done with Maxtor. After 10 years of buying internal hard
drives, and 6 + years of external hard drives I am done. As most
people may know Maxtor was bought by Seagate. It's not Seagate that
I'm mad at, it's Maxtor's lack of commitment to making a quality
product. My story:

I bought a One Touch III Turbo edition 1 TB RAID drive a year ago. It
died in 2 months later. I had it replaced by Maxtor under warranty
via their RMA program. I got a replacement (refurbished) drive in
about 4 weeks. It then died 2 weeks later. Again, I replaced the
drive under warranty via RMA, 4 more weeks pass. Next drive, DOA! I
was insane at this point.

The next drive I got, I sold it (it was working when I sold it).
Hopefully the person who got it didn't have it die on them. Chalking
it up to a poor product line and showing my commitment to Maxtor, I
then moved on to the Maxtor Shared Storage NAS device (has a 1000 Mbps
Ethernet card). 1 TB capacity as well. After about 6 months of
having it and loving it, thinking I was in the clear. The disk has
failed, again, just like the One Touch III Turbo edition. I'm going
to have it replaced, because I don't want to be out $700. But this
was the last straw. I just don't understand what happened to Maxtor.
I still have One Touch first edition 80 and 160 GB hard disks that are
over 6 years old and they run perfectly still.

Thinking of switching to the Western Digital My Book. Apparently
their RAID drives are serviceable and open up so that the user can
replace the failed drive themselves. Has anyone used the My Book
products? How are they as far as drive failures go? I have used
Lacie in the past as well and they make great drives except some of
their Big Disk products have had compatibility issues w/ Windows XP
SP2. I'm assuming these are resolved, however, I now run Vista so I'm
not sure what my luck would be like there either. Can anyone make
suggestions?

Thanks,
--Kev

On 2 Apr 2007 08:55:25 -0700, "Kev" <KevPrescott@gmail.com>
wrote:

>I am finally done with Maxtor. After 10 years of buying internal hard
>drives, and 6 + years of external hard drives I am done. As most
>people may know Maxtor was bought by Seagate. It's not Seagate that
>I'm mad at, it's Maxtor's lack of commitment to making a quality
>product. My story:
>
>I bought a One Touch III Turbo edition 1 TB RAID drive a year ago. It
>died in 2 months later. I had it replaced by Maxtor under warranty
>via their RMA program. I got a replacement (refurbished) drive in
>about 4 weeks. It then died 2 weeks later. Again, I replaced the
>drive under warranty via RMA, 4 more weeks pass. Next drive, DOA! I
>was insane at this point.
>
>The next drive I got, I sold it (it was working when I sold it).
>Hopefully the person who got it didn't have it die on them. Chalking
>it up to a poor product line and showing my commitment to Maxtor, I
>then moved on to the Maxtor Shared Storage NAS device (has a 1000 Mbps
>Ethernet card). 1 TB capacity as well. After about 6 months of
>having it and loving it, thinking I was in the clear. The disk has
>failed, again, just like the One Touch III Turbo edition. I'm going
>to have it replaced, because I don't want to be out $700. But this
>was the last straw. I just don't understand what happened to Maxtor.
>I still have One Touch first edition 80 and 160 GB hard disks that are
>over 6 years old and they run perfectly still.
>
>Thinking of switching to the Western Digital My Book. Apparently
>their RAID drives are serviceable and open up so that the user can
>replace the failed drive themselves. Has anyone used the My Book
>products? How are they as far as drive failures go? I have used
>Lacie in the past as well and they make great drives except some of
>their Big Disk products have had compatibility issues w/ Windows XP
>SP2. I'm assuming these are resolved, however, I now run Vista so I'm
>not sure what my luck would be like there either. Can anyone make
>suggestions?


I suggest you buy a Seagate with 5 year warranty and put it
in your choice of enclosure that has a fan, or add a fan.
If the budget allows $700 setups then you might venture into
territory a bit more like a fileserver used as a NAS, which
gains multiple drives for redundancy, a larger (generally
higher quality) PSU, more flexiblity, better cooling.
Downside- it's larger. Does it matter with it being a NAS
you can place further away than with USB or firewire? Only
you can decide.

"Kev" <KevPrescott@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1175529325.033878.219050@l77g2000hsb.googlegr oups.com...
>I am finally done with Maxtor. After 10 years of buying internal hard
> drives, and 6 + years of external hard drives I am done. As most
> people may know Maxtor was bought by Seagate. It's not Seagate that
> I'm mad at, it's Maxtor's lack of commitment to making a quality
> product. My story:

Both of my original WD 850MB (yes MB) drives are still working. My 1.7GB
seagate drive is still working. My 6.4GB WD drive is still working. My 20GB
(whatever Dell used at the time) drive is still working. My 80GB Maxtor
Diamond Max broke after a few months. it was replaced and broke, it was
replaced a second time and now I have stuck it in a low-use Media centre PC.
My 160GB Samsung Spinpoint is still working. I have colleagues with similar
maxtor backgrounds, now I won't touch them - maxtor, not my colleagues!