Maxtor Announces 80GB Platters

mackstann writes "StorageReview has some info on Maxtor's new 80GB hard disk platters. The new drives based on the 80GB platters will come in capacities up to 160GB, with some having Serial ATA and/or 8MB caches. They are also resurrecting the (formerly Quantum) Fireball name, shortening their warranty (previously 3 years, now 1 year), and adding some slim (38% thinner) drives to their lineup." New products like this make me feel like I'm not keeping up fast enough. I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!

Comments

Re:Wow, sounds deal-tastic!

[Ark42]

the 1-year warrenty thing isnt completely new. CompUSA brand (maxtor) drives I have seen had stickers on the side of the box saying "1 year warrenty". The sticker was placed over the spot that had formerly said "3 year warrenty".

Video editing, anyone?

[Dark Paladin]

I've been transferring the old video tapes of my daughter onto DVD (thank you, Superdrive and iDVD), and it's not surprising how fast these things get eaten up. As more people start using their home machines as digital editing stations, they'll be happy they've got these drives.

Well, that and when you try to review Icewind Dale II and it takes up 1.5 Gigs of space...

Re:Hmm...

[buysse]

If you think that seagate has a good warranty record, you never had to fucking deal with the original Barracudas. I had one conversation that went like this:

Me: "Hi, I have another dead Barracuda. It's a ST12550N, serial number XXXXXX."
Me: "Really. I'm holding it in my hand. That's serial XXXXXX."
ST: "No, that drive is in Singapore in our warehouse by my records. Apparently you have a stolen drive, what was your name again?"
Me: "This fucking drive was a warranty replacement that I got last month, and it's already dead. "

And so forth. This went on for about two hours, with Seagate telling me that it was not possible that I had a drive their computer said was in Singapore.

Over the course of a year, we had over 30 failures of SCSI Barracudas, mostly ST12550N (Yes, I do still remember the model number.) The drive changed several times, giving a different number of sectors with each firmware rev and each warranty replacement, which made it hell to use them in a RAID array (and suicide not to). We had to send two off for replacement at a time, and pray that we got two that had the same number of sectors... and rebuild all of our RAID-1 arrays periodically with new disks just so that we could pair them. Granted, that was mostly the fault of the DPT controllers (PM2122 EISA, with 8M of cache and hardware RAID in 1993. w00t.)

Still, the replacements were sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, and any RAID system would have been fux0r3d by these drives shrinking. As I said, we had over 30 failures, but we only owned 24 drives! I know that Seagate has improved now, and I use their drives again, but it took years.

The point of the rant? Seagate's warranty track record is not outstanding. At all.