Maxtor Hard Drives

MAXTOR HARD DRIVES: Maxtor seems to have done a good job of getting it's IDE consumer hard drives marketed through many different retail outlets (they can be found everywhere), however I've had more than one occasion where I have regretted buying this brand because of it's incompetent, finger pointing, arrogant customer support, or it's flaky bundled in software. Allow me to explain the most recent incident. I purchased a 60 GB 7200 RPM retail packaged drive to add to my sisters home computer. It comes with Maxblast software on a floppy, which is intended to format the new drive & to mirror over an existing operating system from your old drive to the new bigger drive, so that you can unplug the old drive & boot up from the new drive. Problem is that it didn't work properly. Maxblast software copied the files over & formatted the new drive, but it wouldn't boot from the new drive (probably the boot sector wasn't copied over successfully). So I phoned Maxtor at their 1 800 262-9867 number & they wanted all kinds of irrelevant information from me before they would even listen to my simple question of why the Maxblast software didn't work right. The guy from customer support said that the problem could be caused from reflections on the IDE cable if the old & new drives were both on the same cable. When I asked why the instructions in the Maxblast install didn't mention this & why there were no printed instructions that might warn of this, his answer was "well this is FREE software, so what do you expect". So I said something like, "so let me see if I understand you correctly, you're saying that it's ok for this software to only work in a half-assed way because it's free & bundled in, that making the software work correctly & have proper instructions, wasn't important because it's free?". At this point he says "this conversation is over" & he hangs up on me. Now let me tell you that I get a little sick & tired of companies saying something is FREE when it is bundled in. I also get sick & tired of EXCUSES for why companies didn't make their own software to work properly. FREE is something you get for absolutely FREE without an obligation to buy anything, but it is not FREE when it is bundled in & you paid money for that bundle, it is INCLUDED. Besides, the retail version of this drive with the bundled in Maxblast software, IDE cable & mounting brackets was selling for $35. more than the identical OEM version that came without those extras, so there was NOTHING for FREE, I was paying $35. extra for these bundled extras & they should work properly. While there is probably nothing significantly different about the Maxtor hard drives than any other brand, if you want to avoid badly written bundled software & arrogant customer support attitudes, I would recommend buying some other brand of hard drive like Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, or Fujitsu (not Quantum because it is now owned by Maxtor), all of which are usually in the same price range. I formerly liked IBM drives because I found their customer support to be pretty good & their cross shipping policy on defective drives was excellent, however IBM has turned it's warranty administration over to Hitachi & they don't have cross shipping any more. I've also had two IBM IDE drives go bad on me recently & I'm not sure they are up to industry standards. Seagate may be the only company that still offers a cross shipping policy for IDE drives. Make your purchases be your vote for companies who have better overall support than their competition. Don't just buy the easiest to find product because they've flooded the market with it, go out of your way if you have to, to buy a product with a little better reputation & start sending a message to manufacturers that you deserve better products (in this case better software) & better customer support.

By Doug Hembruff.
First printed March 26, 2002
Last updated April 23, 2003