Anyone care to recommend a reliable brand of hard drive? Failing that, do I really want to have to replace a drive every year? I have now possibly (the data still seems to be there, just the directory is jumbled) lost two drives, both made by Maxtor in the past 6 months. Given that I have another that has been in service for i-dunno-how-many in a different machine, I’m thinking it’s not so much the drive as possible how it’s attached. The troubled ones (one is just mechanically dead) were both in external FireWire enclosures. Once I lost the first and suspected overheating, the other has been in an open enclosure. The room is cool, like mid 6os, so I doubt that’s an issue.
A real downside to FireWire enclosures is that you don’t get any SMART monitoring, as you on internal drives. That might have saved me. Alas.
I have to get something, if for no other purpose than to copy all the restored stuff onto. But that drive has been holding backups in a quick and dirty rsync-based arrangement and I’m sure I want to retain the ability to do that going forward.
So do I keep faith in Maxtor? Do I try another brand?
<updated> the iMac we bought late last year has a massive 250 Gb drive, so DataRescue is sucking everything it can off the drive and restoring it there.
Looks like it’s finding a lot of stuff, since I hope it was just a corrupt catalog. Still not sure how trustworthy the drive is.
And all I wanted to do was cue up some music so I could work on NaNoWriMo stuff. gah.
I’ve been meaning to rant on this exact topic.
Christy had a drive fail in her iMac about 2 years ago in a bizarre way; upon research, it turned out that it was a known Maxtor firmware problem.
Lately, my G5 has balked on reboot, so I finally ran the hardware check disk, and it turns out I’m having SATA errors, again on a Maxtor drive. So I bought a 400-gig Seagate, which I put in my spare drive compartment, and migrated everything over. So far (10 days), so good.
It’s only anecdotal evidence, but the number of links I found to the Maxtor firmware problems (often triggered by power surges, apparently) led me to avoid them, for now at least.
Ironically, I once held the same position on Seagate, which had a replacement-on-failure policy on the 40-MEGAbyte drive that shipped in the Mac II, but mine never actually failed.
One other crazy idea: My PowerBook drive failed earlier this year, but I noticed it worked fine for a while after booting, then failed. I wound up getting all my data off by using a coldpack on the drive/wrist rest area to keep the temperature manageable long enough to back it up.