Two years ago, I purchased a brand-new Maxtor DiamondMax 160-gigabyte hard disk drive. Today, the hard drive has failed. Maxtor is under no obligation to do anything about it, since the product had only a one-year warranty. This is the classic case of a product breaking down as soon as the warranty expires. The problem is particularly annoying, since the failed product is a hard drive, which has my important data on it, which I can no longer access.

Is two years the industry standard for the life of a hard drive? I think not. I have another, admittedly much smaller, hard drive, which I have used almost daily since 1998, and which has not failed. My experience with computers leads me to believe that hard drives generally can be expected to last much longer than two years.

I contacted Maxtor regarding my frustration. Predictably, they said sorry, there's nothing we can do, unless of course you shell out more money. Their only suggestions were: (1) their hard drive exchange and upgrade program, and (2) the Seagate data recovery service. Of course I want to recover my data. But I imagine the Seagate service will cost me more than I paid for the drive to begin with. There are several do-it-yourself software packages available which can recover data off a failing hard drive. These software packages are reasonably priced, and I believe any of them could recover my data.

The most desirable outcome in this case would be for Maxtor to provide me with data recovery service, free of charge. Alternatively, they could provide me with do-it-yourself data recovery software, free of charge, on an as-is basis. Either way, this would compensate me for the substandard performance of their product, and enable me to recover my lost data. I have no illusions that Maxtor will do either of these things, so I will probably end up purchasing the do-it-yourself data recovery software. The only other thing I can do is warn others about my dismal experience with Maxtor.

My point is this: I bought a Maxtor hard drive, the hard drive broke, and I got burned. Beware.

Product Details:

Maxtor DiamondMax internal hard drive (retail version)
Model: 6Y160P0
Capacity: 160 gigabytes
Price: About $80
Date of Purchase: October 2004
Date of Failure: October 2006

The drive has four partitions on it. Three of the partitions are still readable; only one of them is inaccessible. I downloaded and ran Maxtor's diagnostic utility, PowerMax 4.23, which returned a diagnostic code of de6bab79.