Good drive, Bad Enclosure, Extremely bad customer service

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great drive when functional, easy set-up, good documentation, good price, high capacity.

Cons: Maxtor support is worthless. Enclosure is prone to failure.

The Bottom Line: 
Great drive when it works. When it doesn't don't count on Maxtor support for any help.

Author's Review
I've had other Maxtor products (2 1/2 year old One Touch 200GB and multiple internal HD's) before I purchased this drive. All have worked well up to this point, but I'll start with the review first before I get to the problems.

The drive comes well packed with adequate installation materials for most novice computer users. The drive is housed in a solid feeling aluminum enclosure that serves as a passive heat sink, as no fan exists in the case. This obviously reduces noise, but potentially could lead to drive failure due to heat. The front has a small button used for one touch back-ups when the included Retrospect software is installed. The rear has one USB 2.0 port, two USB 400 ports, a power input socket and power switch. Included accessories are the AC power adapter, which has a green power LED on it, as well as a nice long cord, USB and Firewire cables, software CD, basic quick start instructions, vertical stand and a sheet of little rubber feet for horizontal mounting. The drive comes formatted FAT, but is easily reformatted to NTFS. Installation is simple plug and play with a little software to install prior to connecting the drive.

I purchased my drive as added storage for my non-linear editing system. I like to archive my DV footage on hard drives so I can quickly return to an edit without the need to re-digitize each time, so my current system has over 1TB with the addition of this drive. The drive is 7200rpm and when used via firewire is quick enough to digitize full DV quality video without dropping frames. This drive was in a firewire daisy chain with one smaller 200GB Maxtor One Touch. Overall when functioning the drive worked flawlessly, and unfortunately this is where the problem lies.

I needed to move my edit suite from it's existing location to a new one in the same building. The move was basically just down a flight of stairs. At any rate all equipment was moved gently as should be the case with any product containing hard drives. Upon re-connecting the system and booting it the 300GB drive failed to appear, and the front panel light was flashing rapidly. Maxtor has a front light code FAQ, but the rapidly flashing light strangely wasn't covered in it. The other external Maxtor One Touch 200GB re-appeared perfectly, but no 300GB One Touch 2. Due diligence suggested I remove the 200GB and plug the 300GB directly into the system, sans daisy chain. This method also resulted in no connection. The drive was still in warranty (only 9 months old) so I decided to contact Maxtor for support.

If you plan on purchasing any Maxtor product be forewarned, Maxtor support is neither helpful or timely. Over a two week period I tried to resolve the problem with Maxtor, with absolutely zero success. I would assume they have probably outsourced their support to some third world country, and as such their first response was obviously a canned Knowledge Base answer which barely even related to my problem. I sent a reply with very specific questions which went un-answered for about 5 days. I then re-submitted my questions as a new incident referring to the old incident number, and only then did I get a response to the first reply. However they seemed almost inconvenienced by my asking for additional help on their product, which was still under warranty! They of course again did nothing to help me recover my data or fix my drive, but suggested I return it to them for warranty replacement and loose the data. Well I had over 280GB of footage and about three and a half weeks worth of edits on the drive, so a new blank drive was not an option, I needed to recover the data.

To this they suggested I send the drive to one of the many data recovery services, which start at about $650 and go up from there. Well worth it for the data on the drive, but since I had read about others with the same problem I decided to void my warranty, open the case and try to recover the data myself first before dropping $650 . After removing the drive from it's case and internal controllers (external drives are nothing more then internal drives with external controllers and enclosures) and attaching it internally in my tower, the drive showed up 100% intact and ready to go with all data present! Turns out the fault is in the external enclosure, and it seems I'm not the first to have this problem with this drive. To say the least I would have been more then a little upset if I had paid $650 just to find this out! I have since done an internet search about the mysterious flashing light Maxtor 300GB One Touch II drives, and it turns out this is a common problem, but obviously Maxtor is either oblivious to the problem, or is hoping it will just go away if they ignore it! I have since sent a reply to Maxtor explaining the problem, my solution, and asking that they investigate it further, but as expected this too has received no response. I suggest if your looking for a high quality, high capacity, external drive for storage or back-up you might look elsewhere. It's a great drive when it works, but not worth the headaches if you have to recover the data the way I did, and certainly not worth the headaches if you have to deal with Maxtor support. Maxtor support is virtually worthless. They have a great book of canned responses, unfortunately none related to my problems.

Update: As of 3/2/2006 Maxtor has still yet to respond to this issue, and in my opinion is ignoring it in hopes the issue will go away. As Maxtor has been virtually worthless in support I took matters into my own hands and have since purchased an aftermarket external hard drive enclosure (Adaptec 3.5) and installed the drive in this unit. The drive functions flawlessly. My new opinion: Buy a Seagate or LaCie external, or if your technically savvy enough buy an internal drive and an external enclosure and build one yourself. Bottom line, stay away from Maxtor external drives.

Final Update: On 3/8/2006 I finally heard back from Maxtor about my drive. It seems they could care less about the functionality of the hard drive, and suggested I fill out a high security form, destroy the drive and then they would replace it! I explained to them repeatedly that the drive was fully functional, and that they needed to replace the enclosure only (which I knew they wouldn't do) and more importantly add this info to their customer service database so they can let others know who may have the same problem. They were not interested in letting others know about this problem, and still continued to insist that the drive itself was bad, eventhough I diagnosed it with their own MaxData software and it came back 100% clear of defects. At any rate I have now washed my hands of the issue and will never buy a Maxtor product again, and recommended that other not as well. Their products when working are fine, but they have such poor customer support that it is not worth the money for their products on the chance that you may need support.