[ale] Seagate Acquires Maxtor

Mon Aug 28 13:53:50 EDT 2006

On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 13:04 -0400, Scott Castaline wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 13:13 -0400, James Sumners wrote:
> > Seagate acquired Maxtor a long time ago. In response to the question,
> > I think it has gone the other way. I RMAed a 160GB 7200RPM, with 8MB
> > cache, Seagate drive on July 25th. The drive arrived at their
> > warehouse on the 27th. The didn't send me a replacement drive until
> > the 18th of this month. When I got the replacement drive on the 22nd I
> > didn't even break the seal on the antistatic bag before I had to get
> > another RMA. They sent me a 140GB drive! The person I spoke to said he
> > would ship me an advance replacement, with a return label for the
> > 140GB drive, at no cost. They still haven't shipped the appropriate
> > drive to me. I will be calling them after class to find out what is
> > going on. If they are "out of stock" I am going to request a return
> > label and a check for the market value of the drive. I'll just go buy
> > a Western Digital drive. I've been without my Linux box for over a
> > month now.
> > 
> > On 8/28/06, Watson, Keith R. <krwatson at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> > > Seagate Acquires Maxtor
> > > http://www.seagate.com/newsinfo/invest/annualreport/seagate_acquires.htm
> > > l
> > >
> > > http://tinyurl.com/eof9d
> > >
> > > Does this mean that Maxtor drives may actually become reliable?
> > >
> > > keith
> > >
> > > --
> > >
> > > Keith R. Watson                        Georgia Institute of Technology
> > > Systems Support Specialist IV          College of Computing
> > > keith.watson at cc.gatech.edu             801 Atlantic Drive NW
> > > (404) 385-7401                         Atlanta, GA  30332-0280
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Ale mailing list
> > > Ale at ale.org
> > > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > >
> > 
> Kinda reminds me of the good ole days at Seatrash back about 17+ years
> ago...............

	Funny...  We all have such different experiences.  Maxtor has always
been the top-of-the-line drives for me, reliability wise.  With the
exception of their first year's worth of SATA drives recently (which had
architectural problems when connected with Intel SATA controllers) I've
always had the BEST results with Maxtor.

	Western Wigital, OTOH, was even banned at ISS as a supplier for several
years due to their notoriously BAD drives in the 1Gig - 6Gig range (MTBF
just slightly, only slightly, longer than the warranty - about one year
to a year and a half to catastrophic HDA failure on over 50% of our
drives in house).  They've since improved and we see their drives now,
though we watch them like a trapped rat, even to this day.

	I've even got some old Maxtor 1140's (some with 4 digit serial numbers
- the ones that could be pushed to 1280 because they had extra cylinders
you could access).  Years ago, some Maxtor people wanted them back
because they had never seen a 4 digit serial number on their own
products.  I decided to keep my pair as souveniers.  I don't have any
particular bad experiences with Seagate, outside of a few bad
Barracuda's here and there, but I guess others have fared worse...  I
continue to buy Maxtor (including the newer SATA drives) with no
heartburn at all.  Other than those early SATA drives (largely, but not
accurately, identified by standard 4 pin power plugs rather than the
SATA power connectors), Maxtors have done well by me.

	Had a funny experience, from years ago (~20 years ago), with a Maxtor
drive having one catastrophic "crash" (a very rare event in those days -
we were shocked) and trying to figure out what happened and to recover
the data.  I think this was one of their big ESDI drives (460Meg?) and
was one of the rare occasions that the data was valuable enough that we
had to try everything conceivable to recover the data.  A days worth of
recover is well spent when it recovers a month of work.  IAC...  We
pulled the cover off the HDA (Head Disk Assembly) and found a pole piece
had broken from the actuator.  It hadn't done any damage to the disks or
heads but was stuck in the way so the heads couldn't "calibrate".  We
removed the broken piece and spun the drive up with the HDA cover off.
It spun up and we recovered all the data.  Then we dropped the drive in
the nearest trash can.  :-)  The data was valuable...  The drive was
not...  And those suckers were EXPENSIVE back then.

	For me, at least, Maxtor > Seagate > WD.

	Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

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