Advantages: Great support
Disadvantages: none

...When I built my new machine 2 years ago I decided that a 20Gb 7200 RPM Maxtor drive was the best value. After installing it I was not disappointed I had recently read a review that placed Maxtor’s drive just behind IBM in speed, the drive was certainly fast. After a year I built another new PC but kept the 20Gb for the new machine as a slave drive. My new drive was also a Maxtor since the first had lasted so well. My new drive was a 40Gb 7200 RPM model, but when it arrived it did not work, I sent it back and received an immediate replacement. The new drive worked fine, but the old one failed shortly after I built the new system. I will admit that I get a lot of use out of my drives and I was not surprised when it failed, I used the website to obtain the phone number for returns and I was on my way. Maxtor was very helpful... Read review

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Advantages: fast
Disadvantages: none

...Bought a Maxtor D740X 40GB at the beginning of 2003 from Savastore.com for: its 7200 rpm fast spinning speed and its SMART technology for monitoring any faults that are developed during the years. Also, it has ultra-DMA 133 interface which is faster than the average ultra-DMA 100. So far the drive is reliable and still working without any problem. Since I bought it as an OEM hard drive, there was no documentation attached to it. Worry not. 1. The master-slave jumper setting is pretty obvious on the drive. 2. To confrim that you can download a comprehensive manual (in PDF format) of this drive from the official Maxtor website. The manual has every single details of this drive and others with larger capacities - still Diamond Max D740X range. Even without the manual, installation is very easy even with very basic computer... Read review

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Advantages: Fast Small and 80GB!
Disadvantages: Nothing really

...After getting myself into the whole iMovie and DV camcorder thang, I realised that the tiny hard drive (10 Gb) in my iBook was not enough (1 hour of DV footage takes up 13 Gb), so I started looking for alternatives. As Firewire is the only high speed connection on the laptop, I looked around. Most 30-40Gb Hard drives for Firewire (Also Sony i.Link) were £250, but I saw this one by Maxtor - 80 Gb for under £350. The Box is smaller than I thought, and Graphite and ice to match the iBook, but it does come with an ugly and propriety power supply. Very fast was my first reaction. It can stream DV footage without any dropped frames - and thats 5 Mbytes/s. So, unless you are doing pro DV or something really demanding there is no point in buying the 75Gb drives out there that cost over £700 - the extra little bit of speed is really... Read review

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Advantages: Very Cheap, Very Quiet
Disadvantages: Poorly Made, Burn Out Easily

...In my first foray into PC building 5 years ago, I spent a great deal of time researching components and learning to build a system competently and properly. I decided upon a Maxtor Hard Drive, which was a 40Gb DiamondMax model, mainly for it's price (around £20 cheaper than similar models by Samsung, Hitatchi, Seagate, etc). This was a poor decision. Not 4 months after purchase the hard drive failed. A burn out on the IDE controller board on the underside of the disk, blew up the electronics. I was frustrated, but considered myself unlucky at the loss of much of my data. Undeterred, I sent the hard disk back to my retailer and received a new one on warranty. Installed and ready to go, I was happy I'd managed to sort it all out. However, 2 months later the hard-drive failed, this time the motor had burnt out. Right. I pressed my... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, huge capacity, reliable, well built, quiet, good compromise between speed and price
Disadvantages: Relatively expensive, not the biggest or fastest

...! Drive: READ Min / Max / Average (winbench 99 in MB/s) 36GB 10,000rpm Compaq SCSI drive: 42.4 / 69.1 / 59.3 Maxtor: 32.2 / 63.8 / 49.3 Write Min / Max / Average (winbench 99): SCSI: 24 / 40.5 / 35.7 Maxtor: 12.5 / 24.3 / 19.2 Mainstream applications (business -Winmark) SCSI: 9200 Maxtor: 15400 winmarks (this is a good indication of how the drive will work on a normal desktop). The higher the score the better CPU utilisation for the Maxtor is relatively high, but still within adequate levels at 3% on a Athlon 2800+ with KT400 board. Admittedly these are not that comprehensive tests, but it certainly shows that for general use the Maxtor drive will lose out very little against the SCSI drive unless in write operations - and even then the price difference for so much extra space is minimal. It might not be able to work as well as a web... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Quiet, fast, huge, reliable
Disadvantages: Seek times and RPM are not the best, but are still good

...I initially chose this drive because of its large capacity and reasonable cost. It was definitely worth it. The drive holds over 40GB of data, and is capable of burst transfer speeds of 66.6MB/second via Ultra ATA 66, or 33.3MB/second via Ultra ATA 33. If your computer supports neither of these standards you'll still be able to enjoy the drives speed, but you'll obviously lose out on the burst rates. The drive is very quiet when it is both idle, and active, it's sometimes very difficult to tell whether the drive is active or not because it is so quiet. I haven't had a single problem with the drive as of yet, and I've had it around 6 months, so there's time yet for things to go wrong. The drive does come with a 2 year guarantee though, which means that at least if something does go wrong you can get help.... Read review

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Advantages: cheap, easy to install, quiet
Disadvantages: no bundled software

...I bought the ST340810A – Seagates ATA-100 40Gb IDE 5400rpm hard drive when I was wanting to upgrade from a 20Gb Maxtor harddrive, and wanted a cheap and affordable hard drive. I paid ATS 1645 (around £75) for the drive, after having found this to be the lowest price for the drive on the consumer site geizhals.at (I get a lot of my hardware and software from places found here) from Goldadler – one of Austria’s cheapest computer retailers. Obviously this isn’t going to be the fastest kid on the block, being only a 5400 rpm drive (there are of course a lot of drives at 7200RPM) although funnily enough, this drive had a better average seek time that the 7200RPM model Seagate were offering with the same capacity (8.9ms average compared with 9ms average). It uses the Ultra ATA/100 interface, although there are patches available if your... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, completely silent
Disadvantages: None.

...I have used 2 of these hard drives and never has either of them failed me in any way. Both of the hard drives offer a constant steady speed of around 60MB/s and neither of them make any sound what so ever. I have used a number of different hard drive manufactures including Maxtor, Quantum, Western Digital and Hitachi. Seagate have to be the only manufacturer who has never let me down and offer completely silent computer usage. I found the Western Digital drive to be very noisy. After buying one of these hard drives sometime ago for my main machine I decided again to purchase another one for another machine in the house. As stated the hard drives never make a sound and both offer high speed and stability. I never suffered any data loss with either of the hard drives. The older drive still performs at its speed when purchased and I... Read review

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Advantages: Quite a fast drive.
Disadvantages: One of the "Deathstar" drives.

...Whether you are thinking of buying this drive (2nd hand, most likely as it's a couple of years old) or own one of IBM's 60GXP, 75GXP or 120GXP models, read on for important information about issues with these drives and fixing them. ** THE DRIVE ** Capacity: 40 GB (38.3 GB as reported in windows) Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM Interface: ATA-100 Average seek time: 8.5 ms It's a fast enough drive. It seems to perform quite a bit better than the 5400 rpm 45 GB Western Digital drive I had, it's quite a bit quieter and this one's not dead ... yet. ** BORROWING NAMES FROM STAR WARS ** The main reason I thought I'd write a review on this drive, is to hopefully help a few others who have this or one of the other 60GXP, 75GXP or 120GXP models (as I've read these are equally affected). It didn't take long for a lot of people to start... Read review

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

...Some people call me ignorant for using Maxtor, 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 is because Mac is the only type of computer that I myself will not touch. I have filled this thing up to about half it potential and when I do manage to full it up, I will write agian to let you know the outcome.... Read review

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