Maxtor DiamondMax 80 user reviews (80GB, ATA-100)

Summary Put about 34,000 mp3's on 2 of these drives, all mp3's where cool, about 5 months later i noticed skips on a krap load of my files, come to find out it was the drives... Dont buy these guys!

Summary Had to quickly find a replacement boot drive after 100GB 5400 failed and was uable to buy a replacement of equal size, wanted bigger but local PCWorld dont stock them, Got at 80GB 7200 works perfect so far, took Maxtor 3 week to send replacement for 100GB with no explaination of what fault was. Now runnnig with 100GB 5400 80GB 5400 and 80GB 7200 as the boot drive. Adding drive coolers now since 100 seems very hot

Summary Beware of infant mortality problems with the Maxtor 7200 rpm 80g drive. Mine failed in 6 weeks. I was using the drive with Windows XP Pro and everything was fine. One day Windoze refused to boot complaining that a needed DLL file failed the CRC checksum. I replaced it using the (pathetic) XP recovery console, then found more corrupt files. I connected my emergency backup HD to the IDE bus and booted from that. XP mounted the failed drive, and I was able to copy important files. On the next boot, the MBR had disappeared. I restored it. On the next boot, the partition tables had become corrupted. The XP recovery console stated it could not be fixed. On the next boot after that, the BIOS declared that no HD was present at all. The HD had utterly failed. Moral of the story - back up your important files the INSTANT you see evidence of file corruption problems. It will only get worse, and quickly. And check prices on Western Digital before you buy this drive!

Summary The drive would not install without constant "maxblasts", Windows 2k would only see it as 7GB, The drive fried a month after installation. Customer support was wonderful! They shipped my new drive instantly, and allowed 30 days for return of the old one, and sent a $200 dollar certificate for data recovery. The replacement drive is from a new family, I hope this lasts a little longer