Good deal? Maxtor 300GB 7200rpm SATA155 16MB for $189

Not bad, but i hate Maxtor. I always had problems with their hard drives after a few months. I think the longest i had a maxtor hard drive was for 6 months before i had to replace it.

JzzTrump22 said:

Not bad, but i hate Maxtor. I always had problems with their hard drives after a few months. I think the longest i had a maxtor hard drive was for 6 months before i had to replace it.

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I had a maxtor drive go out on me after 2 or 3 months. I called them and they sent me a replacement, it's been working fine for about a year and a half now

That is a good deal for a 300Gb drive. I have always been partial to Maxtor so I am a bit biased....

wow...thats a huge hard drive...may I ask what exactly do you use it all for? im just curious

Maxtor

I have never had a problem with Maxtor drives.

I have a 200GB and 250GB in a MDD G4 with no problems in the past 2 years.

I also have a Maxtor 20GB that I bought in 1999 for $400. I have never had a problem with it and it is currently running OSX Server 24/7 for over a year, in an old G3.

That is a good price for the 300GB drive. Sometimes CompUSA has really good deals though, like 3 weeks ago $99 for a Maxtor 250GB ATA6 (not SATA.)

300 GB drives are still significantly more than 250GB and 200GB drives.

No! Not Maxtor!!

I bought a Maxtor 80gb FireWire Hard Drive a few years ago to work with my old iBook. After about a year I put the drive inside of my PowerMac G3. The drive eventually got corrupt somehow and most of my data was lost. I recovered 45gb of my 80gb drive, I was horrified. 😡

About 1-2 years ago Best Buy had a sale - Internal ATA/133 Maxtor 200gb Hard Drive - it was like $120 after rebates. I thought - well that last drive was a fluke, this is new, it should be fine! I bought it and installed it in my Dad's PowerMac G4, I had a 132gb limit but, hey it worked and I had tons of space.

I used it as my backup drive to store everything I needed, Home Movie DVDs, Old Software, Backup CD-Rs etc, I relied on that drive a lot. About less than a year later, one day in the morning my Dad said the drive started clicking in his G4. I ran upstairs and turned off the Mac and removed the drive. I've read about 'the click of death' on hard drives and I knew that I shouldn't leave it plugged in or on. I installed the drive in my FireWire enclosure and the drive wouldn't show up in any program (TechTool, DiskWarrior, Disk Utility, or Norton). I did this very briefly fearing I would cause more damage to my already messed up drive.

But, I lost my 200gb Backup drive. 🙁 All my old mac's files, my artwork, animation, video, home movies, old software and everything I used to have was gone. I felt horrible, 10 years of backups carried on from floppies, to zips, to CD-Rs, stored on this 200gb drive were gone forever. Some things I have backed up but, most of the contents of that drive were irreplaceable. 🙁 😡

Now what? Well after moping around for a long time I bought a Western Digital 80gb, I filled that up with what backup files I had from other sources and that today still lives on inside my dad's G4. Less than 2 months ago I bought TWO Seagate 120gb for $99 from Best Buy (Only $50 each, after $50 of mail-in rebates per drive) Now I have two drives, the Seagate has a 5 year warranty on it, now that you can trust. 😀

I would highly suggest that you stray away from the Maxtor drives. Some people have them and they work fine, others have horrible nightmares like myself. If your data is important I would go for a Seagate - I don't know how good the warranty is about saving your data but at least if it dies you'll get it fixed or repaired for free. Take it from me, buy a good quality drive (preferably NOT Maxtor) like Seagate and backup your data to CD-R and DVD-R media once and a while.

You don't want to know how it feels to lose over 100gb of important data less than a year from when you bought the drive it was stored on. No I haven't contacted Maxtor since their online page clearly states that they aren't responsible for lost data. Western Digital on the other hand has a nice site, I bought a 40gb HD at a flea market, it didn't work - but, I looked it up on their support page and it was under warranty! I send that drive to them and got a nice working drive for free. 😉

So remember:
Buy either Seagate or Western Digital (Or other quality brands)
Backup your data often to DVD or CD or other media.
Don't rip the plugs out of the drive while they are on - always Eject them properly

Best Buy usually has frequent deals on hard drives, as long as you mail-in the rebates you can save a lot of money.

Good Luck on choosing a external Hard Drive

(I've found it's cheaper to buy a Hard Drive Enclosure (FireWire/USB geeks.com $30-40) and a Hard Drive and put it together yourself if you can)

Maxtors are good

Maxtor drives have been very reliable with me. I have had over 15 of them in the last 10 years or so plus Segate and Western Digital. I only had three fail because I dropped them and one time because I bought a OEM drive. If you don't play football with your drives then Maxtors are good enough, otherwise you might need to get a more trusted brand like Segate or Western Digital. Perhaps you can take those drives underwater or something. 🙄

I paid $99 bucks for my last 250 GB Maxtor drive without rebate hassles. The best deal I ever got on a drive. Probably a better deal than the 300 GB for $189 since you can always buy 2 250 GB drives for just a few dollars more.

I'll just throw in my 2c. I've only ever had 2 harddrives die on me (through the click of death), and they were both Western Digital. The second one died after only 1 month of use.

I've now got 2 Maxtor 7200 rpm 120GB SATA drives as RAID 0 on my PC and they are wonderful.. having an automatic backup is fantastic.

I've also got a 20GB Seagate Barracuda, which has been faithful to me for about 3-4 years. I would quite happily get another Maxtor or Seagate, but i'd never buy another WD.

It seems that some people have problems with certain drives, so you will either be lucky or not. The best option would be to save for 2 identical SATA drives and RAID them, then at least if one fails mechanically, you can still boot up instantly.

Then again, if your computer sets fire your still outta luck 🙂 but then you should always keep your important data backed up offsite..

I would certainly avoid any Maxtor drives, having lost 2 in the last few years. After my second Maxtor drive went I switched to Seagate and have been impressed with not only the reliability of the drive but the quiet operation. Now if it's speed you're after then Seagate is not the one to choose as whatever they do to quieten the drive does impair performance (a bit). However a lot of it is luck however, as working in the storage space I've seen large failure rates in pretty much every drive manufacturer. For a while IBM (now Hitachi) had a really really bad reputation in the desktop market with the IBM DeathStar (well actually DeskStar) drives claiming huge volumes of data. At the moment some batches of high end SCSI Seagate drives are also suffering from problems.

All in all it's down to personal experience with Disks, but if you stick to one of the big vendors like Hitachi or Seagate you'll at least have a decent warranty to cover you!

regardless of what kind of HD you get, you'll ALWAYS have a chance of it dying on you. As you can see from the posts above, it's the same regardless of the name on the box.

If it's a good deal, take it. Maxtor is a very widely known company, but they're not immune, just like Western Digital or anyone else.

Buying a new HD can always be a slight gamble

Seagate or Hitachi is the way to go if you want Speed and Size , Hitachi will be a lil noisy during Seeking , but they are speed deamons. My Hitachi Deskstar 250GB SATA 150 HD 7200prm 8MB 8.5ms seek time kicks ass.

who needs RAID even anandtech.com said RAID was just hype. got my drive at newegg.com for $135, if you want something quiet i sugget Western Digital or Samsung. Seagate gives you the best of both , but u will pay for it $$$$.