Annoyed and upset *** Maxtor One Touch Beware ***

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Dylanlewis2000

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Sorry for the rant guys but I feel I must let off some steam!

Around 15 months ago I was looking for an external hard disk. It was a sharpish decision as I was out of space and needed to store photos. After looking around I decided to buy a Maxtor one touch 750gb external hard disk. Perfect... or so I thought

After around 12 months of use the drive wouldn't switch on. It had been working flawlessly next to my western digital drives for the past few months, but for no apparent reason wouldn't turn on. Upset as I was, I couldn't risk losing my photos, as I have photos of a friend who passed away and I really didn't want to sent it back by the royal mail only to have a generic one shipped out.

Luckily the enclosure had died and not the hard disk therefore I purchased a external SATA reader from Maplins just to use the drive. This all happened around 5 months ago. About a week after that I decided to buy some more HDD's just as a precautionary measure to do periodic backups. Again these Maxtor hard drives came up again and reared orange their heads, but this time they were only £40, so I thought why not... and bought two, they do have faults now and again so i must have been unlucky.

These drives worked brilliant... for around 3 months then one failed. 2 drives out of three... bad luck or just an absolutely diabolical drive enclosure? I decided to open this drive up as I had been using it to store some of my Masters course work on, and lo behold it was the enclosure that had died. No word of a lie, but within 10 minutes of me opening the drive up from the enclosure there was an almighty pop and the activity light on the last hard disk was no longer glowing.

At this point I just really wanted to cry. 3 out of the 3 drives had died. After a bit of researching on the net, I did find that this is a common problem with them, needless to say I will never be buying Maxtor enclosures again.

What is really funny out of all this is that the drives (made by Seagate) were all ok and functioning, however the oldest drive although it works, I'm sure its randomly deleting files. I have lost a few photos and I am 100% sure I have not deleted them as I wouldn't do that, so now I am puzzled. I am seriously contemplating just buying online data storage and going for that option as this is annoying me to the full but the down side is that some files are huge and would take ages to upload on my 30kb connection.

Sorry for the long post, but however I feel that you should all be warned about these drives. Do not trust these drives to look after your photos or valuable data!
 
A friend at work was telling me of an online scheme he was using that cost him about £50 for 2 years and gives him unlimited storage space from his desktop so less than 7p per day! Not sure of the company but I can find out. Apparently their software runs in the background and mirrors your data to their server.

I have always liked Lacie drives especially the BIG DRIVE which has two drives in one enclosure with FW400/800 and USB. They do another one now with eSATA as well.
 
cost him about £50 for 2 years and gives him unlimited storage space
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Now that I will keep an eye on.
 
Apple have MobileMe as an option too. A bit more expensive than £50 for two years, I think it is £50 per year but it gives the same backup disc (not unlimited) plus email and for Apple users syncing of all manner of other things such as passwords, email accounts, dock settings etc etc.
 
Yeah £50 for 2 years sounds good. I currently have around 250gb of photos, god knows how much i have lost mind you, but im at 250gb atm, so i need something thats good backing up wise.
 
I will email him and find out who the company is.
 
I have first hand experience over nearly 10 years that Maxtor are the most unreliable brand of all. I wouldnt trust one to prop my door open.
 
Maxtor drives do seem more unreliable than others, but at work I see drives failing from all manufacturers. Whatever make of drive your use, the important thing is to all ways have your data duplicated on 2 drives.
 
Only thing I would be wary of with online storage is potential for extortion. Once you've uploaded loads of stuff, what's to stop the company deciding to double their price in 2 years?

Then you're either left with hassle of downloading it all again if you needed to or making a new backup elsewhere, or obviously just paying the extra.
 
Consider the practicalities of online storage.

To upload 250GB to online storage, on a typical residential link of 1 Mb/s uplink would take 26 days of continuous uploading.

On the 30kbps you'd be looking at about 3 years. (based on the calculation that 56kbps would take 605 days, and a single 14Mb RAW image would be almost an hour)




That's a bit longer than the few hours of copying it off to a USB drive. Invest in 2 external drives from different manufacturers.
 
The company is http://mozy.com/

My friend said it took a while to transfer but after that it just does incremental backups every hour or so.

Just had a look myself and looks like you can try it out with 2Gb for free then sign up for the main deal.

It is $4.95 per month which works out at £36 per year

Not sure if there is some special offer that is not obvious.
 
I was looking a Mozy too, but the initial download (around 1.5tb) would probably take too long, shame really as it's a really good idea.
 
I have mozy, and pay for it yearly- its $50 (even cheaper if you buy the 2 year deal). Yea, it does take an age to backup for the first time (90gb for me). But after that its only incremental backups. I have an external drive as well- but for $5 a month, its worth it for fire/earthquake/who knows!
 
Yeah the other option i had was to sit on the Uni's network and upload from there downside is they will not allow us to use FTP, so it has to be a web based uplaoder.
 
Its a client from Mozy that you need to use- unsure what protocal it uses (though you could test using the free account they offer)
 
I've been using Mozy for a while now (in addition to onsite backups) whenever I've done a test restore of files they've been there. I do seem to be updating loads, especially when I've been shooting a lot, the update may take a day or so.
 
The other thing to think about with those services is whether your ISP has any limits, as they'll probably include upload and download, so if you have say a 30GB a month limit, consider the impact that uploading a couple of GB everytime you carry out a shoot or something will have.
 
divine` said:
The other thing to think about with those services is whether your ISP has any limits, as they'll probably include upload and download, so if you have say a 30GB a month limit, consider the impact that uploading a couple of GB everytime you carry out a shoot or something will have.
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In this world of competition I am amazed that none of the ISPs have added online backup as a freebie with their setup. It wouldn't count as internet traffic and would be as fast as the USER<>ISP connection would allow.
 
divine` said:
The other thing to think about with those services is whether your ISP has any limits, as they'll probably include upload and download, so if you have say a 30GB a month limit, consider the impact that uploading a couple of GB everytime you carry out a shoot or something will have.
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Yeah i have 30gb down on peak times, and unlimited off peak.
 
The OP got me worried as we have 4 Maxtor One Touch 250Gb which we use for storage and backup purposes - they are now about 3 years old, occasionally one or two runs hot for a while, but other than that they have been fine. perhaps we have been lucky to date?

We also have a couple of Seagate 500gb (backup of the backup) drives and one did fail after a year.................. but I guess with anything mechanical, failures can always occur.
 
cowasaki said:
In this world of competition I am amazed that none of the ISPs have added online backup as a freebie with their setup. It wouldn't count as internet traffic and would be as fast as the USER<>ISP connection would allow.
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I would find it annoying to be "stuck" with the same isp for my files though. Least with Mozy, its worldwide :)
 
blue max said:
Seriously consider a NAS storage solution (Network attached storage). For example the two disk Netgear Duo (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149510).

Personally I won't feel comfortable unless my priceless pics are on at least three different drives.

Don't wait until it happens to you.

Graham
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Hey i have a NAS for storing odds and sods, but the problem with most of the NAS drives is that they use a linux OS and normaly a funny file system which limits you to using files that are smaller than 4gb, and unfortunatley i have a few files that are bigger. Although i suppose i can get around this, its just a PITA to have a distributed approach.
 
Dylanlewis2000 said:
Hey i have a NAS for storing odds and sods, but the problem with most of the NAS drives is that they use a linux OS and normaly a funny file system which limits you to using files that are smaller than 4gb, and unfortunatley i have a few files that are bigger. Although i suppose i can get around this, its just a PITA to have a distributed approach.
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If you have an old computer lying around then you could install FREENAS. I have done a complete set of instructions for its use as part of my tip a day for the mac thread. The instructions are not Mac specific.

Just look for Tips 188 onwards

and Tip 215
and Tip 220
 
at the moment im living at home, and already have 2 PCs on all the time so i think my mother would kill me if i had another one, but yes free nas does look good i must admit.
 
Dylanlewis2000 said:
at the moment im living at home, and already have 2 PCs on all the time so i think my mother would kill me if i had another one, but yes free nas does look good i must admit.
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A small form factor device with no keyboard, mouse or monitor would do it :)
 
Don't trust your data to ANY hard drive, apart from having iffy quality control and electronics hard drives are mechanical and ANY mechanical device is prone to failure.

CDs now DVDs are still the most cost effective, reliable way to keep data safe. If the data is very important make multible copies. If you keep them safe a dvd will last you donkeys years, I've just pulled mp3s off a cd I recorded 10 years ago and it wasn't looked after particularly well..
 
Steep said:
Don't trust your data to ANY hard drive, apart from having iffy quality control and electronics hard drives are mechanical and ANY mechanical device is prone to failure.

CDs now DVDs are still the most cost effective, reliable way to keep data safe. If the data is very important make multible copies. If you keep them safe a dvd will last you donkeys years, I've just pulled mp3s off a cd I recorded 10 years ago and it wasn't looked after particularly well..
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Not sure standard cds/dvds are a good way of storing data. The average burnt cd will last about 5 years or so (even in good conditions). Unless you consider this a long time- I would look at other options (or archival cd/dvds, which are rather more expensive)
 
I've had a whole batch of same brand CDs go bad on me after a few months. No DVDs yet though. I burn two DVDs of different brands now.
 
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