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RIP Maxtor!

eyoungren

eyoungren

macrumors Nehalem
Original poster
Aug 31, 2011
30,038
29,181
Just about 30 mins or so ago the spare drive on the Mac Pro at work died.

Ordinarily this would be an unremarkable event but I am posting because of the origin and longevity of this drive.

It was a Maxtor 80GB hard drive and was the original drive for the PowerMac G5 my boss purchased in February 2005. It has been powered on 24/7 since that time and has been the main drive in both the G5 and a couple of our PCs for a while. For the last three years it's seen service as my burn drive in bay 2 on the MP. I keep nothing on it I cannot afford to lose and while it's death has taken out downloaded files that were waiting to be burned none of THAT affects my work.

This drive has survived the death of the PowerMac's logicboard and it chose to go AFTER I burned content today and not before or during.

Interestingly, Disk Utility sees the drive as a 0K drive (which is too small to be partitioned) and DiskWarrior does not see the drive at ALL!

I think this is a stellar run for a drive that was probably manufactured in late 2004 and has been running continuously for the last 11 years!

RIP original PowerMac G5 hard drive!
 
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I had a 8gb ide hard drive from an ancient HP computer from like 1995 finally died a few days ago. It was noisy as heck when it ran but then again it's been that way for the better part of 15 years or so. (I enjoyed the sound actually and liken it to Scotty's affinity for the NCC1701a nacelle hum). Anyhow, I had OS9.2.1 on it from a USB2 enclosure. A little piece of my heart went with that HDD. It was not on 24/7 however and hasn't been that way since 2000 or so ;)

Now I have to find a new OS9 solution for my QS. On the bright side, what a great excuse to find and buy my first FW drive. :)
 
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dang guys. congrats on the long run. you must be working with some small files. I've given away stacks of even 1TB drives as the space they take up, the electricity they consume and the speed improvements realized every few years made them not worth the shelf space. I wish I could have given those drives their 2nd or 3rd purpose. them and the 1.5 cubic feet of 1 and 2 GB memory sticks sent to the recycler... you do now have me curious about the 20meg 5 1/4" MFM drive I left in my parents basement so many years ago.
 
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thats all folks said:
dang guys. congrats on the long run. you must be working with some small files. I've given away stacks of even 1TB drives as the space they take up, the electricity they consume and the speed improvements realized every few years made them not worth the shelf space. I wish I could have given those drives their 2nd or 3rd purpose. them and the 1.5 cubic feet of 1 and 2 GB memory sticks sent to the recycler... you do now have me curious about the 20meg 5 1/4" MFM drive I left in my parents basement so many years ago.
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Well, depending on how you see "small" files. :D

For most of those 11 years the drive was a boot drive, so yeah, small files. The last three years though as a burn drive I dealt with files from small to a few hundred MBs. I'm a graphic designer so I regularly deal with PDFs, PSDs, EPS and INDD files. But none really more than a few hundred MBs at a time.
 
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I have older drives trucking on as do many others, I suspect but not running 24/7 from day one. For all the opprobrium heaped on Maxtor drives, I have never had one fail on me (unlike a couple from IBM and Samsung) and I still have a few chugging along in my old PowerMacs. What is it going to be replaced with?
 
weckart said:
I have older drives trucking on as do many others, I suspect but not running 24/7 from day one. For all the opprobrium heaped on Maxtor drives, I have never had one fail on me (unlike a couple from IBM and Samsung) and I still have a few chugging along in my old PowerMacs. What is it going to be replaced with?
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No idea. The boss was on vacation last week.

I am already owed a new monitor (top backlight failed on my left monitor) which he's agreed to replace when he returns. I have to add this on. I may have to resort to purchasing myself and giving him the bill.

Still waiting on two keyboards and another monitor…and a bookshelf. :D

PS. It's always been Samsung and IBM drives that fail on me although some swear by them.
 
thats all folks said:
dang guys. congrats on the long run. you must be working with some small files. I've given away stacks of even 1TB drives as the space they take up, the electricity they consume and the speed improvements realized every few years made them not worth the shelf space. I wish I could have given those drives their 2nd or 3rd purpose. them and the 1.5 cubic feet of 1 and 2 GB memory sticks sent to the recycler... you do now have me curious about the 20meg 5 1/4" MFM drive I left in my parents basement so many years ago.
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I tend to post things I no longer want on CraigsList before sending them off for recycling. There's always someone out there who seems to be interested in it (amazing 1GB and 2GB memory sticks are considered too small these days).

As for the Maxtor drive failing those were solid drives. I don't say this because I used to work there (many, many years ago).
 
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eyoungren said:
No idea. The boss was on vacation last week.

I am already owed a new monitor (top backlight failed on my left monitor) which he's agreed to replace when he returns. I have to add this on. I may have to resort to purchasing myself and giving him the bill.

Still waiting on two keyboards and another monitor…and a bookshelf. :D

PS. It's always been Samsung and IBM drives that fail on me although some swear by them.
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the older IBMs work great, and I know the new 850 series SSDs are superb. Seagate isn't my choice, but the WD black and greens are my favorites when it comes to 3.5" drives. HGST is a good storage brand, designed for enterprise (and known for longevity)
 
128keaton said:
the older IBMs work great, and I know the new 850 series SSDs are superb. Seagate isn't my choice, but the WD black and greens are my favorites when it comes to 3.5" drives. HGST is a good storage brand, designed for enterprise (and known for longevity)
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I'm not too keen on the WD Greens what with the inability of the Mac to sleep with that drive installed, but I do agree on the Blacks. My preference is WD Red though. Server drives and longetivity and all that.
 
eyoungren said:
I'm not too keen on the WD Greens what with the inability of the Mac to sleep with that drive installed, but I do agree on the Blacks. My preference is WD Red though. Server drives and longetivity and all that.
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I should specify my use cases:
* WD Green: cheap, long term storage. Backup and forget.
* WD Black: durable, well priced, day-to-day drive.
* WD Red: really perfect for my servers, and its pretty close to an HGST (which I have in my MP)
 
I also remember that WD greens also had an issue with Linux, where Intellipark could cause the parking count to increase astronomically until a fix was issued. This came up when I helped my brother set up a Vortex box. Anyone not that clued into HD issues would have had their drive fail in short measure. Otherwise WD are generally solid drives and rather decent in laptop format.
 
Had to actually turn the MP off and pull the drive this morning. Something I avoided doing on Friday but there were some loud electro-mechanical whining noises emanating from the Mac when I came in to work this morning so it had to go.

Manufactured July 2, 2004.

2016-10-17 07.23.23.jpg
 
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