I can’t remember the last time I bought a Maxtor hard drive. Tales of drive failure both personal and anecdotal have caused me to cringe whenever I see one of them on sale (which they always are). I find myself constantly advising people NOT to buy them when they say “But its so cheap, how bad could it be?”. My response to that is “just don’t put anything important on it”. At which point they either take my sage advice, or come back to me in a few months with a broken drive and ask me to fix it.
When they were purchased by Seagate not too long ago (a year? two?) I hoped that Seagate would take some of Maxtor’s tech and incorporate it i to their high standards and good QC. Well, Maxtor hasn’t been completely absorbed yet, and they are still crap. And now…
I came across this link on Engadget “Some Maxtor Personal Storage 3200s shipped with virus.” So now these woefully inadequate drives will actually INFECT your computer with avirus before they crash and take all your data with it. But hey, at least they don’t charge you extra for this new “feature”!