Hard Drives > Maxtor Hard Drives > ATA-100

Advantages: quality product
Disadvantages: poor product support

i have 2 of these hdd in my box at the moment and am very happy with them lets go into a little more detail the drive is a 3 1/2" form factor drive which will fit into 99% of pcs the ease of instalation is realy dependant upon the case its going in but in a quality case you could install one of these in less that 2 minuits. the capacity of the drive is aproximatly 80 gb a real gig is 1024 , drive manufactures discovered that making a gig 1000 meg ...
...factor when partitioning and formatting etc. so on average the drive will be around 76 gig. the drives are not the quietest in the world but for the price are very good i would recomend these drive to anyone that is either building a new system or just needs more storage space ... Read review

Advantages: Fast seek times
Disadvantages: Poor RAID 0 performance, highly unreliable, noisy

...and they were replaced with Maxtor Plus 9s (which I also reviewed here) which have worked perfectly so far (touchwood). I've never learnt from Maxtor exactly what the problem was, but I assume it was poor quality bearings in the drive motor. If you can stand the noise (which will creep in eventually), they're decent enough drives with great seek times, but coupled with their poor RAID 0 performance (it only seems to happen on cheaper controllers ... Read review

Advantages: UDMA-66, its big, its fast, and is the sarah michelle gellar of hard drives.
Disadvantages: Leaflet (who needs it), Disk (who needs it), no jumper setting indication on the drive itself.

...drives, its trial and error time. and I don't know anyone who likes plugging and unplugging IDE cables, especially UDMA-66 ones. roll on ATA-100. Good drive, but maxtor need to start thinking about real life situations and how the drives are going to end up after a year or two. ... Read review

Advantages: Reliable, Cheap, Fast, easy installation.
Disadvantages: Faster, higher capacity models exist now.

I bought this 80 Gigabyte hard drive two years ago for £70, having filled up my original 8 Gig one with various junk (music!) from the Internet. I have been pretty happy with the performance of this hard drive. It is a fairly large hard drive and meets all of my storage needs. My hard drive has always performed quickly when accessing files on it, even when it is fairly full. It has always been reliable and I haven't had any problems accessing files ...
...quietly and is barely audible even when it is put under strain. I found this hard drive fairly easy to install as it comes with an installation disk and a very thorough step-by-step guide on how to set it up. The guide describes how to affix your hard drive inside the PC, which cables to plug into it and how to change its settings to slave or master drive. The installation disk is inserted once the hard drive has been physically installed. This ... Read review

Advantages: Maximizes the amount of data vs the cost of the product
Disadvantages: heat issues, cord connectivity, and small installation problems.

...but I honestly only order Maxtor for my hard drives. Now the only downside to the Maxtor 500 GB is that it is an external drive that, if not careful, can overheat and cause connectivity problems, transfer speed issues, or just annoyance from when the usb gets knocked out. That being said, if you can get past the downside of have an external I would recommend this product to anyone not using a Mac. The only reason I do not recommend this to Mac owners ... Read review