Maxtor L01P200 Internal 7200 RPM 200 GB Hard Drive

This is a great drive. It's fast (about twice as fast as my other 2 and 3 year old 7200rpm drives) and it's silent and seems to be reliable. It's also at a great price for the capacity, and it's Maxtor, a trusted name in hard drives. I got the ATA card with mine, but I used another Silicon Image card I purchased previously (it has the same features but gave less problems, my computer took longer than it should to start up with the Maxtor ATA card). The MaxBlast software worked perfectly and never gave me any trouble. All those giving bad reviews because of the software or lack of card need to stop complaining. The point is, the actual hard drive is great, and you won't go wrong purchasing it. I like it so much, I decided to purchase the 160 gig version to replace two of my other hard drives.

And this one is no different. I had purchased a 160GB Samsung to start building my new PC. I took this drive home only to find that their partitioning software that you have to download from their website did not even work. Instead of searching the internet for third party software to do this, I took the drive back to the store and got the 200GB Maxtor instead. Installation was simple, I just popped it into my PC and it was recognized immediately. I installed the Max Blast software and the drive was partitioned, formatted and ready to use in less than 5 minutes. NOTE: Your registry has to be modified to be able to recognize drives larger than 137 MB, but the Maxtor software does this for you.

I will always buy Maxtor from now on; great products with no BS.

Maxtor is typically a trusted name for me, having purchased dozens upon dozens of drives for various purposes during the course of my IT career. So, when I wanted to upgrade my personal portable USB drive (which contains my digital media), purchasing the Maxtor 200GB seemed to be a no-brainer. Let me add that I've used a slew of different drive brands and sizes in a slew of external cases with no issues...

Unfortunately, Maxtor seems to have slipped in the QA department. Typically, if a drive is going to fail, it will fail within the first 30 days. This one did. So did the next one. And THAT was a first EVER in over 10 years in the IT industry. I was pretty much floored.

I found that both failed units exuded excessive heat given the 7200RPM of this drive and both failed after heavy I/O usage causing the heat to increase even more. Now, we all know drives get warm, but this baby (both) were HOT to the touch. Something is amiss in Maxtor factory...Read more