Hi

Is there a free utilility that will tell me the state of my hard disks? i.e. whether they are on their way out? Scandisk says they are ok, but I don't want to lose my mp3s!!

If you have a Western Digital drive you cann go to their support site and download Data Lifeguard tools. http://support.wdc.com/download/ I'm not sure if it works on other drives or not but it is a good utility.

If your drive is an IBM, use the Drive Fitness Test.

Maxtor also has a utility to check their drives which my 60GB drive just failed. Now I have to figure out what to do with 50GB of mp3 files while I get a replacement drive

Get one of those CompUSA 40gb USB hard drives... and put the other 10gb elsewhere?

I have a 40gb maxtor I need to RMA. I should do that.... sigh.

I think this is the last Maxtor drive I will buy. I'll go back to WD. I don't really want to go out and buy a drive to hold the files while I get a replacement. I'll call them tomorrow and see what they can do for me.

Ah crap.

I like Maxtor; Their RMA policy doesn't suck (they will ship you a drive if you provide a credit card number they can "hold" against, then you ship the old one back). I did get one bum drive from them, a 60gb when those were new. They fixed it right off.

The 40gb that went bad was after several years in an always-on but low traffic fileserver. it was in my wife's PC having just been "retired" from fileservice when it failed.

I'll go back to WD

Bad move in my opinion. I can remeber back in the <1GB days when WD was the best and Maxtor was the worst. Now, it is the exact oposite. If I can help it, I stay as far away from WD as possible.

WD had a 6GB IDE drive (Caviar 36000 i believe) that I had to RMA many of. Then, I had 10GB SCSI drives in a RAID5 array. 4 out of 6 eventually died. That machine has Seagates in it now that have been running for the past 2-3 years without issue.

Currently, my default hard disk brand is Maxtor. If cost is an issue, I think Samsung is making some excellent (fast & silent) drives these days. I've been staying away from IBM drives (my old favorite) since they admitted their drives should not be run for more than 8 hours per day. IBM also screwed me on an RMA once.

I don't think I've seen any of my Seagate Cheetah's die (or any of the Barracuda's for that matter). I've lost one Maxtor, an older 40 GB 7200rpm IDE model that always ran loud and hot. I've got two Maxtor 80's right now (7200) and they're both cool & very quiet. The 40GB was RMA'd (at 2.5 yrs old)no problems on their website. I got the replacement in about 1.5 weeks, not bad considering ground shipment to/from NH to CA.

-Zeke

That's good to know that I can have them ship me a drive so I can copy the files over before shipping it back. I know that some of the files could be bad and I'll end up having to rip some cd's over again but not the whole lot of them thankfully.

My WD drives are over 5 years old and I've had no problems with them. This is my first Maxtor drive and it's maybe 10 months old and crapping out already. Guess I am just lucky.

I feel your pain. Any drive failure just plain sucks.

-Zeke

It sure does and thanks for the sympathy. I now have 3 drives to spread out files on after having lost everything once when a hard drive crashed but the drive that is going only holds my music on it, nothing else.

Found out it was going bad when I tried to defrag it a couple of nights ago and ended up having to run scandisk on it. I knew it couldn't be good news when it locked up twice trying to repair errors.

At least your drive is failing in a nice way. I bought a removable IDE cage for my DishPlayer PVR drive, and the day I got the cage, the PVR drive died, taking 20 hours of TV I wanted to archive. It's really noisy when it spins, and does the painful to hear click of death.

As far as brands, I go with the general trend at the time. Though the bad days of Maxtor still make me bitter enough to avoid them most of the time.

IBM is the drive maker I am currently looking at though. Tag Command Queuing in an IDE drive sounds awesome.

WD had a 6GB IDE drive (Caviar 36000 i believe) that I had to RMA many of.

How long ago were you getting 6GB drives? I think things may have changed again since the time you're speaking of.

I can remeber back in the <1GB days when WD was the best and Maxtor was the worst. Now, it is the exact oposite. If I can help it, I stay as far away from WD as possible.

I would hardly call WD the worst HDD company. I've bought nothing but WD drives for a long time, and keep in mind that Laura's not putting 6 drives in a RAID config. she's looking for a desktop hard drive. IMHO, WD has great drives for that. My 80GB SE drive is incredibly quiet and very fast. WD also has a great RMA system that I used to replace a drive that failed on me only because of some stuff I was doing to it.


I like Maxtor; Their RMA policy doesn't suck (they will ship you a drive if you provide a credit card number they can "hold" against, then you ship the old one back)

Western Digital also has this RMA option. I didn't choose it because I didn't need a new drive all that quickly.

I've had three out of four Maxtor HD's that I bought this year fail on me. Then I bought a WD SE drive which is still spinning very happily.
I like WD, only thing I don't like is the noise level. I think I'll try Seagate next. Those SoftSonic FDB motors they're using for their drives are supposedly the quietest in the world and are therefor very tempting to me.

I've been very impressed with how quiet the new Seagate drives are. When I replaced the disk in my PC here at work, it was eerie, just how quiet it got.

I've got a pair of 80Gb Seagates in my box at home, and they're very quiet as well. Just make sure that you keep them cooled properly.

Yeah, I know. That'll be no problem. The temp of my HD's never goes above 28°C.

Now I'm waiting for Seagate to release it's first serial ATA drive. Because that model will also have 8mb of cache. (like the WD SE series). So that should give me performance AND silence. AND then I can finally get rid of those flatcables that have been bugging me for FAR too long now.

I'm glad to hear from somebody that's actually been using them that those Seagate drive DO make a difference in reality, and not only on paper.

The point is I have been soured on the WD brand since those two experiences. IMO Western Digital is the worst drive manufacturer. While that may not be true now, in my experience it was definitely true in the past. I don't forget very easily and hold I grudges.

I trust Maxtor enough to install in my TiVo. Even though the drive I installed is 7200RPM, it is tons quieter than the stock drive (Quantum). Yeah, I know some of Maxtor's drives are actually Quantums.

Right now I have 3 Maxtor D740 80GB drives in my house in various computers in my apartment. All work extremely quietly and fast and two of them are on 24/7. I am also experimenting with a Samsung 40GB 5400RPM drive that I think is excellent.

Well, all I'm saying is that you hold those grudges, but not the ones from when you say Maxtor was worse?

Oh well, I think they're excellent and they haven't truly failed on me yet, so I'm happy. If I start hearing some bad noises within the next 2 years, then I'll agree with you. until then...

That's true. Oh well, I am not about to try another WD drive personally. Maybe I will build someone a computer with one and see how it goes.

The only WD drives I've ever had a problem with was back in 94, when I bought 6 6.4G drives. 4 out of the six failed. It was explained that there was a quality control issue at a plant and that it had been resolved. They sent me 4 more drives, all ran reliable for >4 years. ( I lost contact with them when I quit that job) I have had 2 seagates fail on me personally. (again, was YEARS ago) My gf's 30G Maxtor just failed on her 2 days ago so I've been farking with that all day. My last 10 drives have all been WD's, and I've never had a problem with them.

In other words, drives are mechanical in nature. Mechanical things fail. No matter WHO makes them. I agree that QC is important, but I would venture that all the major manufacturers pretty much have that under control. Just my 2¢

Mason

I am not about to try another WD drive personally

Me neither tried my first ever in January, failed two weeks ago. I've got a 120 SE that was the D drive now running but I'll go back to Maxtor after this. I would like to get some data off that drive before RMA'ing it... Any ideas? It just keeps clicking when power is applied to it. It used to read after awhile but not anymore...

I guess I am lucky that I am not getting any clicks of death and I can still read the drive and get info off of it. I better RMA it soon before I can't.

I don't forget very easily and hold I grudges

I used to be like that too, but I've learned that no manufacturer is infallible. I've had HD's die on me from Seagate, WD, Maxtor, IBM, Quantum,... That doesn't mean they ALWAYS produce bad drives.
IBM used to have a pretty good reputation, until the 75GXP debacle of last year. Same goes for Seagate (anyone remember the 1 and 2 gig medalist series ?)

This also applies for other computer hardware like eg. motherboards. I think Asus is a pretty solid motherboard maker, but I've also seen some bad motherboards from them. Same goes for Aopen.
So I've leard now to first read the reviews of new products, and if they are mostly positive, THEN buy the stuff. Of course, this is not 100% bulletproof, but in that case I still have my warranty. Remember, this is microelectronics we're dealing with. It doesn't take much for it to fail. That's why good warranty is so important. Something the Empeg people understand better than any other company I know.

True. I'm looking to get my motherboard replaced soon if the next BIOS update doesn't solve my problems. Man, I'm pissed.

Oh no, I can't find the stupid receipt for it

You don't need a receipt to RMA a hard drive. They go by the drive's date of manufacture.

I found that out after I went ahead and filled out the RMA form on the website and read the return instructions Usually things don't go bad on me until after the warranty is up so I've never had to RMA one before.

I should get my new drive next week