Praetor, I don't know why you feel the need to stick up for Maxtor so much, but bad company's don't go out of business right away
Yes bad companies dont go out of business right away but neither do they last so long. Nor are their drives used in hospital archiving systems.
but a lot of companies make mistakes, they just fix them, and if they don't, you'd be surprised how long they stick around.
Ok so if I understand you correctly, "Maxtor makes nothing but garbage and they dont correct any of their 'problems' yet they last so long".
I hear from a lot of people that their drives aren't that reliable, and yet another drive my friend has (along with one of mine) has a "Failure may be iminent, back up and replace drive" and "BAD drive, backup and eplace immediately" notes in the BIOS, so I'm pretty sure Maxtor isn't that great.
Im clever enough to realize that "Maxtor sux" sounds a lot like "nVidia sux" or "Ati sux" or "AMD sux" or "Intel sux" or "Dell sux" or "Gateway sux" etc etc etc. The point here should be obvious but just in case it isnt: you can pick any company you want for HDD and with enough googling you'll find people that say "that company sux".
Since the beginning of the year I've bought ~30 western digitals, ~20 Hitatchis, ~20 Maxtors, ~15 Seagates -- does this mean Im a western digital fanboy? Hardly -- I buy a product to suit both the price profile and system requirement. As for me, ive had Maxtor drives fail and Ive also had drives fail from WD/Quantum/Seagate/Hitatchi/Fujitsu as well and with a weekly throughput of ~1TB, a Ghost every day and a hard format once a week, its fair for me to say that I push my drives pretty hard -- regardless of whether they be Maxtor or not.
So why do I have Maxtors in my system? Well, to be honest (1) most of the time I have 4x160 Maxtors, for a good chunk of time on any given week I'll swap them out for Hitatchi's and WDs -- why? Because it suits the purpose and (2) back when I bought these drives, the Maxtors were the cheapest in their class. Now it just so happens that Hitatchi/WD have occupied the cheap-drive slot for this capacity class.
The bottom line? I'm not a fanboy. Perhaps Maxtor's made a bad drive here and there, sure that happens everywhere -- look at the GXP75s, or a few of the Cheetahs back in the day (if you ever dabbled with SCSI). But anyone who says "Maxtor sux" outright doesnt realize that with that logic set (or lack thereof), damn near every company that has ever made drives sux -- because they have all had craploads of failures. To dismiss Maxtor from a harddrive showdown would be like to dismiss the influence that Dell has on the computer industry -- suffice it to say -- silly and shortsighted.
So as I said earlier:
Every company has its good stories and their bad stories ... just like everywhere else.
Its kinda silly to compare harddrives so universally and without a grain of salt (or in some cases, a whole crapload of it)