Dunno how many of you build, upgrade or maintain your own machines out there, but I received a nasty shock when my primary hard drive on my desktop, a Maxtor SATA 120GB unit, failed earlier this week. The nasty part wasn't the loss of data - I have daily backups scheduled, so there wasn't any loss - the nasty part was the one (1) year warranty on the drive.
I've been a satisfied customer of Maxtor drives since the early to mid-1990s and guess I missed it when they announced a sharp decrease in their standard warranty period back in 2003-2004. Since that time I've had two Maxtor drives fail; the first I thought was just a fluke as it happened with an older model, but this second failure occurred less than two years since buying the drive.
I spoke with my brother-in-law about the problem (he does on-site repair work for Dell and IBM laptops and desktops) and was told that almost all of his hard drive replacements these days are failed Maxtor models. Savvy upgraders and self-maintainers are well advised to go with companies that offer the longer 3-year and 5-year warranties, such as Seagate and Western Digital.
So I'm spending the evening rebuilding my software image from scratch with two new Seagate SATA 160GB drives. |
