Hard Drives Are Hardly Hard

I bought a 1TB Maxtor Shared Storage II external hard drive in December. I figured I needed so much storage because I deal with a lot of video clips for editing my presentations plus I shoot a heck of lot of digital still photos — plus there’s all that music… and so I needed a lot of storage. I chose the Maxtor drive because I have two others (a One Touch 250GB and a One Touch III 500GB external drives) and was generally pleased with the company and their products.

The 250GB drive had had a few hiccups recently (I bought it in 2004 and it had some corrupted disk space recently) but the 500GB drive (purchased in 2006) works perfectly. The 1TB (that’s 1000GB) drive is a networking drive, which means that I plug it into my router and it wirelessly communicates with any of my computers without any connecting cables. It’s a very simple operation to backup things to it automatically, and I think that’s cool.

I got the drive in December and then backed up everything on all my computers, plus made a second copy of everything on the old 250GB drive. This new drive has three LED icon displays on the front, but they aren’t labeled, so you have to try to remember what the icons mean (the icons don’t immediately remind me of what they’re for). I could never remember what one or the other meant and oftentimes found myself wondering what they were for and what they were indicating. And then, along the last few months, it seemed like the drive occasionally kind of “disappeared” for a while — sometimes it was just not there on the computer’s desktop and I found myself having to restart the connection — or worse — restart the drive.

And so the other night the drive had once again “gone missing” and I pressed the power push button (no on/off switch for Maxtor) and all the LED’s started flashing and doing whatever it is they’re supposed to do… I think… but then they stayed like that, flashing away. So I… (dramatic pause here) unplugged the drive. And I waited a few seconds and plugged it back in. And that’s when it made a clicking noise. And I have to tell you, a clicking noise in a hard drive is not a good thing. And then it kept on clicking and didn’t stop. And it still hasn’t stopped (every time I’ve plugged it in) and the drive has never been accessible since. My $763 (with tax) networking hard drive is broken and it’s only five months old!

Now luckily, everything on it is merely redundant back-up for things I have on other hard drives and various assorted computers, so I didn’t have a big freak out. But it’s a pain and it shouldn’t happen like this.

Maxtor was recently bought out by Seagate, so the warranty and returns are now handled by them. And Seagate is a great company but their public interface (via their website) leaves a lot to be desired. After navigating around on their website for a while, I found the return page — and was informed that they will exchange the drive since it’s still under warranty. But I’m not sure I want another one of these, given how it failed so quickly.

And what if I’d had irreplaceable information on that drive? I’d have entrusted my digital information to a very expensive piece of equipment that failed after four months… That does not seem right. And to re-do all the work I did in backing all this material up will take hours. I’m not sure I’m going to continue using Maxtor — although that may be a moot point, given that Seagate now owns them and who knows what they’ll do with the name. Also, since Seagate will only send a replacement and not let me upgrade to a Seagate drive — I guess I’m using Maxtor for a while. I’ll keep you posted on how it progresses. Let me know you experiences with Maxtor…

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HDD, Maxtor, Seagate, warranty