Problems with Quantum Drives

[Big Turkey]

I recently had my two-year-old iMac hard drive die on me. This was pretty harsh, considering the warranty was up on it. I went to MacFixit to get some advice on this and discovered that I am not alone in my problem. Seems that the Quantum drives (Quantum was recently swallowed by Maxtor) are flawed and die in iMacs quite regularly. I know a couple of people with the same make in older macs that had them drop dead and in some pc's as well. No one is addressing the problem and many of us are having to turn to replacing the drive (the head mashes itself into the drive, very messy). Anyone else want to step up and show the same problem. Maybe Apple will see how many of us are unimpressed with the short life span of these crappy drives.

[jefhatfield]

companies usually rectify bad components quickly and secretly without calling attention to it

sony had a bad internal cdrw model once and emachines had a bad powersupply and those issues died when they were fixed and i don't remember hearing anything about them, the issues were just addressed quietly

a two year old hard drive dying is something apple will fix but unless you are connected to apple, you will not hear about it when it is fixed...things like your incident are bad press for any company

if you were under the three year warranty, apple could have possibly replaced it with another bad hard drive and two years from now, you would be stuck with another dead hard drive, but by then you would probably be ready for a new apple because by then, they should be at 2 to 3 ghz and have G6 consumer level machines (extrapolating from the formula that processor speeds double roughly every 18 months)

...if you keep a machine for four years, it is sometimes possible to see that same price ranged machine be nearly ten times faster in the new machine

my mid-1996 era pentium came in speed ranges from 120-150 mhz and exactly four years later, similarily priced machines had already cruised past the 1 ghz mark by april 2000

i assume you may have the two year old imac which cruised around 350 mhz or so and now the fastest imac is at 700 mhz so i think at the very least the imac will be at 1.4 ghz but more likely well over 2 ghz by the time another two years pass

i think many makers don't build parts to last very long anymore because they see the consumer buying computers so often and disposing of them after two or three years...i can't belive it when i see a four year old laptop which originally sold for three thousand sold in the back of a pc magazine for 299. as a refurbished model so unless you make money with your machine, your computer is an expense and not an investment

these are just my humble observations as a pc tech and i hope this helps (my advice is get the hard drive replaced with another brand at your local apple dealer)

[Edited by jefhatfield on 12-17-2001 at 12:31 PM]