Rating: 
Summary: Great Product
Review: ...I've got one attached to my iBook, and I loved it for the first three months or so. Nowadays it tends to not wake from sleep mode. I have to unplug it from the computer, then from the power brick and let it sit there for five minutes or so.Maxtor was completely lost when I contacted them for tech support. I'm still using it for software and music archives, but I keep all my really important projects elsewhere in case it finally decides not to wake up.
Rating: 
Summary: It's a great drive when it works
Review: ...I've got one attached to my iBook, and I loved it for the first three months or so. Nowadays it tends to not wake from sleep mode. I have to unplug it from the computer, then from the power brick and let it sit there for five minutes or so. Maxtor was completely lost when I contacted them for tech support. I'm still using it for software and music archives, but I keep all my really important projects elsewhere in case it finally decides not to wake up.
Rating: 
Summary: Unreliable and error-prone
Review: Does not work properly on win 2K/Pro/Advanced/server ... watch out, will go on and off line for no reason, give buffer overruns, and sometimes refuse to come up at all. Maxtor sez windows problem. Microsoft sez maxtor problem. Switched to XP, and it works GREAT. You decide who lies.
I have 5 of them now.
Rating:
Summary: Good external storage
Review: Does not work properly on win 2K/Pro/Advanced/server ... watch out, will go on and off line for no reason, give buffer overruns, and sometimes refuse to come up at all. Maxtor sez windows problem. Microsoft sez maxtor problem. Switched to XP, and it works GREAT. You decide who lies.
I have 5 of them now.
Rating: 
Summary: Great, but died after 6 months
Review: Great drive, but it died after 6 months. However, Maxtor support was great, sending me out a replacement for free (warranty for a year I believe). I managed to have most of my data backed up on my local drive, so there wasn't too much loss. A co-worked also owns one and has had problems where the drive "calibrates" itself in the middle of large transfers, forcing him to start over. When it works, it's a star. But don't rely on it 100% for your only drive
Rating:
Summary: Great Product
Review: Great product! Firewire is the way to go - forget USB 2.0. This device has worked flawlessly. With Windows 98, I was not able to play video files directly from the drive without stuttering. However, after getting a new, faster XP based machine, this problem went away. You probably should not use it for playing games or rendering video files. For a high-speed, deterministic response you should use an internal drive for that. If your work PC or a friend's PC has firewire, there is no better way of transferring a massive amount of data between PCs.
Rating:
Summary: Defective Design and Components
Review: I bought one of these about a year ago and it only worked for about 3 weeks before it started going bad. The hard drive would spin down every few minutes unpredictably. When this happened when I was writing to it I got a lot of data loss of course. As I discovered later the power to the drive was not consistent. I pulled the drive out of the ... enclosure they had it in and put in my PC directly (it came formatted FAT-32) and it worked fine. There were two boards in the enclosure, an firewire to ide bridge board and one for distributing power from the external power supply. It turns out the board for the power supply is defective. I suspect there's a bad capacitor on that board, that's why it fails periodically. Geez these guys couldn't have spent a couple more cents and shipped the thing with more reliable components? ... I ripped out the bridge board and hard drive and have them inside an old scsi enclosure and it seems to work fine.
What a hassle they inflicted upon me just because they couldn't spend a couple more penniew on a higher grade of capacitor or a better board design.
Rating:
Summary: Defective Design and Components
Review: I bought one of these about a year ago and it only worked for about 3 weeks before it started going bad. The hard drive would spin down every few minutes unpredictably. When this happened when I was writing to it I got a lot of data loss of course. As I discovered later the power to the drive was not consistent. I pulled the drive out of the ... enclosure they had it in and put in my PC directly (it came formatted FAT-32) and it worked fine. There were two boards in the enclosure, an firewire to ide bridge board and one for distributing power from the external power supply. It turns out the board for the power supply is defective. I suspect there's a bad capacitor on that board, that's why it fails periodically. Geez these guys couldn't have spent a couple more cents and shipped the thing with more reliable components? ... I ripped out the bridge board and hard drive and have them inside an old scsi enclosure and it seems to work fine.
What a hassle they inflicted upon me just because they couldn't spend a couple more penniew on a higher grade of capacitor or a better board design.
Rating:
Summary: How do they make it quit when the warranty period is over?
Review: I bought one of these drives for DV video editing when they first came out, late in 1999. It worked great with my firewire Macintosh and Apple FinalCut Pro. Shortly after I bought a second one, which worked at first, then became very flaky. It turned out that the external power supply was defective. Maxtor replaced the power supply after some delay and it worked fine. I even bought a third drive. In late December of 2001, the second drive's power supply failed (just as the warranty had expired!). I was able to use another power supply on the drive and keep it working. Then, in early January of 2002, the first drive began to make peculiar noises and would lock up. Fortunately, I was able to copy the contents on this drive to the newest one. Then, a few days later the second drive began to develop the same symptoms and I bought a fourth drive (from another manufacturer) to attempt to save my data. At present the second drive works for awhile, then locks up. So far so good on the third drive. In summary, just out of warranty two out of three of the drives have failed. That's a pretty bad track record. I can't in good concience recommend these drives to anyone. I'd have to say reliability is far from ideal. There must be 100 hard drives in our office, and we've had maybe two (besides these) fail in the last few years.
Rating:
Summary: Mind Control Studios, We love this drive!
Review: I bought one of these drives for our facility and its great!
Fast access times, plug and play, runs like a champ. We have
run DV compressed video on these drives and never had a dropped
frame. I want to stack 13 of these drives and have a full
terrabyte.
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