Rating: 
Summary: Drive began to fail within 20 days
Review: The product is easy to install and worked fine out of the box. You really want a USB 2.0 or Firewire connection if you are going to move lots of data.The drive I purchased from Amazon suddenly began to chatter, click and thunk in the way a drive can do shortly before crashing. This may be an unlucky 'infant mortality' case, but very disappointing nonetheless. I've been using Maxtor drives exclusively for more than a dozen years and this is the first failure.
Rating: 
Summary: Maxtor makes a good drive, but...
Review: their tech support is terrible. I bought a Maxtor external firewire drive when I was running Windows 98SE. When I experienced installation problems, tech support told me that I either didn't know what I was doing or that I had a bad drive. They (and I mean they) were downright arrogant about it. I returned the drive and bought a Western Digital external firewire drive. Same problem surfaced, but WD's tech support diagnosed the problem in about one minute and gave me the location on their site to download a software patch solution. They told me that the quirk was old news. Neither drive was defective, but Maxtor's service sure was. Five years later, I've learned a lot about PC innards and willingly buy Maxtor drives when the deal is right, but then, I'm no longer dependent on tech support and I assemble my own external drives for about half the price.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Drive!....UNTIL IT FAILS!!!
Review: This drive worked great for a few weeks. I decided to put most of my information on the drive, since it was so easy to use. A few weeks later, it failed and I lost everything. I have tried it on several computers and they all fail to read the drive.
Thanks Maxtor. Unfortunaley, you just lost another customer.
Rating:
Summary: Bad Customer Service and Clunky Software
Review: This is a convenient tool for one that is a computer genius. And I mean genius in it's literal terms. If you aren't you're going to have some trouble like I did. Read the manual? I applaud you if you can understand what the heck that thing says. I've been using a computer for 10 years and I'm often teaching others how to use it and fixing my friends computers as well. I consider myself computer literate. But when it gets down to the deep and dirty technical stuff, I'm lost especially when it comes to external hard drives. So, quite naturally, when I first bought this external hard drive, after installing it as the directions guided me to, I had no clue what to do afterwords. Things weren't working and I called tech support. The first agent I spoke with told me that my Maxtor was defective and to return it for another one. He also told me to learn how to use a computer first. Mind you, I had been reading and reading not only the manual but also reading tech information on their site as well. And I had been running experiment after experiment trying to get this to work on my computer for 2 days. After no progress and pure frustration, I called tech support again. I got an agent on the line that wasn't very enthusiastic about her job and just wanted to rush through the call to get off the phone as soon as she could. This is where the poor customer service comes in. With every question I dared to ask, she condescended to me and made sure I felt like an idiot for not knowing the same material she did. Ummm, excuse me mam, but uh...that's why I'm calling. (?) Of course, I didn't say that to her, but that's what I felt like saying. The irony here is that she had to call for assistance twice because, she-herself didn't know how to solve my problem in a couple instances. The problem was this: This external HD advertises that it comes pre-formatted. Well, I made the mistake and took that literally and thought that all I needed to do was follow simple instructions and that I'd be on my way. WRONG. I give her credit, though. After having spent 45 minutes on the phone with her while she was helping me format a drive, I was able to finally use my external device. I also give her credit for helping me instead of telling me my device was defective like the last agent. Although she DID help me, it was less than a pleasure dealing with her. Ok, fast forward three weeks later. Now the one-touch part of this device isn't working anymore. I get the infamous, "This program is not responding" when I load the program now. And it takes my computer 10 minutes to STOP the program. My computer has 80gigs of hard drive and 780-something for my RAM. No programs are running in the background, and I don't have much installed on my computer. I don't know why my Maxtor had decided to no longer work. I tried reinstalling it today, and no progress. The only way for me to backup all my information is to do it the old fashioned way which takes me about an hour. So, it looks like I'll have to make another phone call to their lovely and pleasant tech support department. Goodie! Anyway, like I mentioned before if you know your stuff inside and out about computers, you should have no problem. This device is a VERY handy tool, and it's better that I have this than nothing at all. Good luck to you. And I pray you don't have an experience like I did.
Rating: 
Summary: Almost perfect
Review: This is an excellent product. I am running a pair of high speed drives in RAID 0 so I was concerned about backing up on a regular basis. This drive installed (using firewire) in less than 10 minuits. The software and the manual are easy to understand. I was able to back up 20 gig and have it checked for errors (there were none) in under a half hour. Excellent.
My only suggestion is to have the drive spin down or turn off when the computer is turned off. Perhaps this can be done with firmware? The choices are to let the drive spin, which Maxtor says is OK or to pull the plug. These solutions are less than optimum. Except for that, this is one excellent product.
Rating:
Summary: Big Let Down
Review: Thought they were cool. I'm in the business so I bought two to use as backup. Both failed in the first year. One of the replacements failed outside of the first year warranty.
Rating:
Summary: Crashed within 2 years
Review: Unfortunately one of my two 5000DV's crashed within about 2 years.
Rating: 
Summary: robertp
Review: very happy with the item. If your going to transfer data to and from your computer you should have USB 2.0 to move data fast.
Rating:
Summary: Maxtor 5000dv is Nice!
Review: Very simple installation under XP. Well written, easily followed instructions. Changed disk format to NTFS to match internal hard drive; this took a few minutes. No problem installing Retrospect back-up software and seems to work as advertised on a trial run.
Rating:
Summary: Failed in 4 months!!! DO NOT BUY THIS - you are warned!
Review: While this drive was easy to setup and had nice features, it is all pointless. After only 4 months, this drive just suddenly crashed with an awful clock tick-tocking and squeaks. Everything I had backed up to this drive (its purpose) was lost. And what makes this drive a complete failure is the indifferent customer support. Even though my data could be recovered by them .. they WILL NOT do it. Instead, I must pay to have it retrieved by a very expensive third party company. Which means now, that this is a brand I will NEVER buy again! Having read other reviews, I know I am not alone. This is a great product if, ultimately you want to get rid of your valuable files. But on second thought, save your money and just delete them. Much less hassle and it's free!
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