Maxtor DiamondMax10 300Gb Hard Drive under £67 Delivered

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My friend and I both had a Maxtor drive and brought them within one week or so of one another. His died within 10 months and mine within a month later. Reason unknown?

As you can imagine I would never ever recommend or touch one of theirs drives again. Infact I wouldn’t have one of their drives for free.

seth

I looked around and this is a good price.. Thanks OP

I was surprised the 400, 500 and 700 G drives are now available in the UK and the prices are about £113+VAt+P&P for the 400 at Ebuyer.

With regard to the brands an reliability the this is based on

1) Components
2) Design
3) Environment of drive in use (temperature /particulate levels, smoke,dust)

Given the components in a batch run of drives are the same, and the design these days is near perfect, and the insides of most PCs are much of a muchness the biggest variability is the component quality in a batch.

When a drive is made it is part of a production run of so many hundred thousand units. The parts used in the drives are also made in batches. When a drive fails it is a component failure, eg. spindle, head crash, stepper motor failure etc..

The QA for all drive is very good, so if you buy a Hitachi (aka IBM), Maxtor, Seagate they all have top class fabrication plants so you get great product. Even the unbranded OEM 30G and 40G are made by one of the big players if you run a software probe on the controller.

So when you hear people say I buy brand X and it is a tip top drive, no problems, and someone else says, brand X suck I had 3 fail. It is just that a particular batch was duff: When you get one failure in a batch the failure rate for the batch is very high. Overall the mean time between failures is incredibly low.

Modern hard drives are very reliable, and all have self correcting routines on the controller, they reformat and mask bad tracks in use. Try running Spinrite on a 700g drive or even a 300g and see what I mean! Look at the SMART Stats page!

The 500G plus units use perpendicular recording and this will push to over 1Tb units by year end 2006.

If like me you get through thousands of hard disks (building grid computers) and work on system that need to be reliable you always make sure that drives in a single unit come from very different batch numbers. This ensures that intrabatch high failure rates to not affect drives in the same unit. Look at the serial numbers and batch codes, and the production dates as these all provide the info you need.

The other thing to note is that HD used to come with a 5 year warrantee, as it is driven by price now the warrantees are lower 3 or 1 year. So keep the drive and invoice, contact the manufacture and get a replacement while it is still covered.

In most case the drive goes back DIRECT to the manufacturer, so they are used to turning stuff around quickly. Make sure you download the drive test program for your manufacture and follow the returns procedure for the drive. If the drive is new then sent it back to the retailer.

There are expensive drives with longer warrantees these are the same as the OEM stuff, you pay for the warrantee. Save the money and upgrade the drive when it breaks!

I have drives that have been running for 3 or 4 years continually, but for places were it matters then use fresh drives <2 or 3 years old. For firewalls and log server (that are not audited) then any old rubbish will do. I have one firewall with a drive from 1995 running 24x7 on a firewall, still works fine on its 3rd PSU and 2 CPU fan, the only time the machine has crash was a mains spike (forgot to plug in the UPS!) and when the original CPU fan died. 11 year old drive chugging along nicely...

Make backups what ever drive you use. It is getting hard with the capacities hit the 1TB per drive! Remember the dyes on DVD-+R and CD are only stable for a few years U/V temp and age massively reduce the life of the dyes. DVD-RAM dye is stable for 30 years plus, it is part of the spec.

Finally if you drive does die run spinrite on its recover rate is amazing, it can move data of bad bits of the disk BEFORE (and after) they fail. It moves it to safe parts of the disk. Worth running routinely as it gives you an indication of the health of the drive.

Most drive problems on Windows are logical not physical so a chkdsk /f on all the drives will fix a lot of problems. There was supposed to be a newer journaling file system in Vista that has been dropped from the 2007 release. NTFS is better than FAT a lot of USB drives are formatted as FAT reformat as NTFS is you plan to use only XP with the drive.

If you are getting rid of an old PC with data on the drive, run boot and nuke on it. Just boot from the CD / floppy it does a forensic level DoD certified wipe. This is a free program.

nedski

Note that Maxtor have just been bought by Seagate... maybe this is something to do with the price drop?

N.

quoia

needstoknow wrote:

this is an interal harddrive, you can get cheaper still if u look around

quoia wrote:

Perhaps you could show me/us where ?

At less than 22.3 pence per gigabyte INCLUDING P&P !!!!

Then I'll buy one of "yours" instead of one of these !

If possible it would be nice to have this information before they are all sold out or the price goes up !

Or perhaps needstoknow, your name is needstoknow because you don'tactuallyknow ! :rotfl:

Totoriko

quoia wrote:

If possible it would be nice to have this information before they are all sold out or the price goes up !

Or perhaps needstoknow, your name is needstoknow because you don'tactuallyknow ! :rotfl:

He may have said that to slow us down so he can grab them all himself

snax

Can be found slightly cheaper per unit if you've got time to search - but works out more expensive when you add the shipping cost

S.

u2o

whats savastore like with deliveries etc, anyone used them before?

TLJester

u2o wrote:

whats savastore like with deliveries etc, anyone used them before?

I've used them. They are pretty good, much like most big companies.

quoia

If anybody wants one of these AND lives in the BOLTON area (so can collect) check out,

Scan Computers International Limited
27-28 Enterprise Park
Middlebrook
Horwich
Bolton
BL6 6PE

Order ONLINE but opt for the Q-Collect service

They have the same drive:
300 Gb Maxtor 6L300R0 DiamondMax 10, IDE (PATA), 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 9.0 ms

for £55.25 ex vat = £64.92 inc vat.

However you get a "freebie" with this - a "Xclio Hard Disk Cooler Aluminum"

Currently "All Maxtor IDE, SATA & SCSI Hard Drives on offer, bundled with Xclio Hard Disk Cooler Aluminum suitable for ALL 3.5" HDD's (IDE/SATA/SCSI) - worth £4.00 "

This offer is on their "Today only" 24hr offer page

http://www.scan.co.uk/todayonly/

... last one in the selection of Maxtor IDE drives on offer

However because it is FRIDAY's "Today only" it actually includes the weekend (ie Sat and Sun) and this offer page won't in fact change until late Monday morning.

So if you live in/near Bolton it's ONLY £65 AND you get a FREE Disk Cooler !

Only wish I lived nearer and could collect - delivery kills the deal at £10 +vat