Originally posted by: kb3edk
...I've had just as many problems with Seagate and WD drives over the years.
I have to think that, in all honesty, Maxtor can't be much worse than anybody else. But even if every drive made had the same chance of dying, I'd still stay away from Maxtor/Hitachi because I actually want to be able to RMA the drive and not have to wait a month for a new one.
A lot of people complain about having a lot of Maxtor drives die, but when it gets down to it, a lot of these people
only bought Maxtors for a couple years because they were cheaper, and have probably had a somewhat reasonable number of them go bad.
I've got a 30.7GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 45 in my secondary computer right in front of me that was made 10 Oct 2000. It's the oldest drive I've got in either of my machines.
I used to think WD was terrible. It just annoyed me that a lot of their lower-capacity drives used previous generation platter densities, and I'd had a few bad experiences with them. I think I was still holding a grudge because the very first computer I built from the ground up had a 1.6GB WD that died on me. I think it's funny that to this day people say IBM/Hitachi sucks because of the "Deathstar" drive, but they don't remember the rash of bad WDs and the ultra-slow and unreliable Quantum Bigfoot.
Seagates? I've bought a ton of Seagates, and I honestly can't think of the last one I had to RMA. I think it was a 4GB SCSI drive from the dark ages.
Originally posted by: toattett
Originally posted by: Tostada
Also, I think Maxtor & Hitachi have both stopped cross-shipping RMAs.
Old policy:
"You want an RMA? We'll ship that out today. Just get us back the old one in 30 days or you'll be charged for the replacement."
New policy:
"You want an RMA? Run our diagnostic software (which will format your drive and mark out all bad sectors so you will NOT get an RMA if your drive works at all), then give us the diagnostic code, then send us the defective drive. If you don't package the defective drive properly, we will deny your RMA. When we get the drive, if we want to give you a replacement, we will send it out in about 14 days from the time we receive the defective one."
That is very interesting. I had just done a Advance RMA with Maxtor online, and of coz it was no questions asked because it automatically generated me a RMA number. I got the drive a week later, and I sent back the drive after I made sure the replacement work. I didn't even buy that drive in the US but I got a replacement from Maxtor in US.
Hmm...
I don't want to be giving out bad info here.
I know for a fact Hitachi's RMA policy is just terrible. I've been on the phone with them multiple times. They came pretty close to outright telling me they didn't care that my drive didn't work. My brother was telling me that he had the same kind of problems with Maxtor. I know the last time I had to RMA a drive with Maxtor, they were very friendly and very quick to approve my RMA, and said something about a "no hassle no aggle" RMA policy, or something like that. But then a few months after that, I had to RMA a Quantum drive, and I had to call Maxtor and they had me on the phone for about an hour basically asking me if I was a total idiot and knew how to hook up a hard drive. Maybe they've changed their policy again and aren't giving people so much of a hard time anymore.