Tom’s Hardware Guide: Tom’s Hard News: I will say that I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with Maxtor drives. I’ve been working with about 12 external drives (mostly 250 gigs) over the past year or so and have had several of them fail on me. They don’t fail completely but parts of the media on the drive somehow gets corrupted or goes bad. I’ve had the worst experience with the latest one touch drives which do not include a fan and instead are supposed to rely on the aluminum casing for aledgedly cooling the unit. These drives run very very hot.
Also, the hyped “one touch” feature — I’ve never gotten it to work. Yeah I haven’t tried in about a year, but after spending four or five hours on it I realized it wasn’t that important. The other sucky thing about Maxtor is their customer support. They are not available on weekends or evenings which is generally when I try to troubleshoot things. And finally — yes I know this sounds like a hate piece on Maxtor — Maxtor has no real tools to help you when you do lose data on their drives. The only thing that even remotely resembles a file recovery utility is some weird download from their website that requires you to make a floppy on your A: drive and then doesn’t work at all. Why even have that on your site? And didn’t A: drive discs really belong to the last century?
Anyway. I should be receiving my first non Maxtor drive (a 250 gig Cobra) this week. We will see if I have more success with that.
In the meantime I’d probably steer anyone that cares about their data away from Maxtor products for the time being — particularly if you use them for mp3s or other digital media… based on my bad experience of course.