Quantum and Maxtor are now one, though you can still differentiate which drive
line belongs to who because the line names haven't changed. I hear good things
about both of these lines now, but my memory is still scared by both. Even
though I use IBM drives now, I still remember the stickion drives that you had
to beat on in order to get them to spin up. I also remember those drives that
had a faulty ground finger, so the spindle would build up a static change and
then discharge across the platters. When it comes to Quantum, the memory of
those winning drives that where not too reliable is still very vivid in my
mind. Also, some of my coworkers still complain that they are partially deaf
from those drives. You should have seen the chuckles that I got out of one of
my co-workers when I told him that Quantum was advertising quite drives. I'm
still too afraid to buy one of these mostly do to how long they sold cruddy,
whining drives. (Then again they used to always be the low bidder.)
I also have a Maxtor. I have been using computers with Maxtor drives ever since
my dad brought home a 286 with a full hieght 5 1/4 Maxtor drive. (The drive
started off as a business drive, but the computer it started off on got
retired.) The drive then moved on to a 386. The drive must of had been in use
for over 10 years and in that entire time, only few few clusters went bad,
taking out the display for my eighth grade science project that I had labored
many hours over. Since then I have almost continually have had a Maxtor drive
in one of my computers and I have never had a problem. I remember a couple of
years back I know someone that worked for Fry's Electronics and he said that at
the time he was seeing a lot of Maxtor drives being returned because the heads
snapped off.
With Western Digital, I have had mixed experiences. My Dad once had a 1 GB
Western digital drive on his P100 back when the P100 was about the fastest
machine around. One of the heads snapped off on the first drive within a few
months, so he got Western Digital to replace the drive. The replacement drive
suffered the exact same fate a few months after that. A few months before my
Dad bought his P100, he picked up an 850 MB Western Digital. He used that drive
for a few years and then put it in storage. A couple of years back I decided to
build a buget firewall and got him to give me the drive. To this day it is
still in use on a machine that is left running 24/7. Something to watch out for
is that not all that long ago Western Digital had a big recall of drives. My
mother had a drive that was manufactored right after the end of the recall and I
just sent it back because it was flaking out on her and when I tested it one of
my computers, it behaved poorly. With my brother's 18 GB 7200 RPM drive he had
a problem where one of the pins stayed in the connector on the IDE cable when he
unplugged the drive. Fortunately my Dad was able to solder it back on and my
brother hasn't had a problem since. I have also been hearing that more recent
Western Digital drives have bugs when working in UltraDMA mode.
> I personally prefer Quantum hard drives, although I have not had
> any maxtors or WD, I know about IBM and Quantums being
> good linux drives.
