You may recall that last year I had two Maxtor drives fail one after the other. Last week I started having one of my other Maxtor drives start locking up intermittently. I ran SpinRite on the two Maxtor drives in my desktop system and both of them came up with horrendous numbers of ECC errors. 2,681,123 on one, and 2,076,616 on the other. They both came with only a 1 year warranty, which ran out last May, so these end up in the junk pile. I think I have only one Maxtor drive left in operation at this point, the one that got replaced in warranty last year. I’ll have to run some tests on it too. It’s currently in a USB case.
Today I bought a couple of Western Digital drives to replace them. Since the problems with the other Maxtors last year, and the problems with the IBM/Hitachi drives a few years back, I’ve been buying Western Digital and Seagate drives and have been fairly pleased. I would have preferred to get Seagate since they sell all drives with a 5 year warranty, but Western Digitals come with at least a 3 year warranty in Taiwan which is not too bad. (In the US WD sells drives with as little as 1 year warranty, but you can extend the warranty coverage for a nominal fee on their website. This is one of the few times I would recommend getting an extended warranty.)