I was in our local Best Buy the other night. I can’t remember why, but I was in the hard drive aisle, just glancing at prices. An older woman came in, said she wanted to return her hard drive, as it’s given her nothing but trouble and her geek friend said that it was an incompatibility with her hard drive and her motherboard. The Best Buy “Geek Squad” sales droid said that “these are all standards parts and should work fine together.”
For the most part he’s right, until the lady mentioned she was trying to return a Maxtor hard drive. At this point, if the geek knew what he was doing, he would asked what processor she was running — AMD or Intel. Why is this important? Because it’s a very well known and very well documented problem with Maxtor hard drives and the nForce4 chipset that powers many newer AMD motherboards. But the “geek” had no idea about this, despite the fact that this problem has been out there for many many months and only recently has some fixes (many of which still don’t quite work, according to some forum threads).
But since the “geek” didn’t ask this question, the lady started walking out of the store feeling dejected. I walked and caught up to her, explained that the guy was full of crap, and brought her back into the store. I walked back into the store and I found a guy behind the counter that I went to high school with back in the day and who knew I was a die-hard geek. He was one of the “geek” managers. I explained to him the situation, the stories behind the data corruption, and while it was news to him too, he took care of the refund, probably because he was an old friend of mine.
So what’s the easiest way to solve Maxtor hard drive problems? Pick other companies for your hard drives. I’ve always had good luck with Western Digital hard drives, and I know Simone’s liking her system I built for her that has three of them. Just avoid Maxtor like the plague.
That, and don’t trust anybody at Best Buy.
Comments
Amen to avoiding Best Buy! You have to practically throw a brick at them to get them to stop and answer a question in the first place! Then they stand there like idiots and give you a deer in the headlight look. How come this store always manages to find those type of people?!
Thanks Jake! 1000x thanks! My disks were acting up and I had no idea what the problem was. I’ve got 4 Maxtor Diamondmax 10s (different sizes) hooked up to an MSI P4N SLI (nForce4) board.
I’ve never heard of this issue, so thanks again for just randomly posting this!!
See, I wouldn’t expect you to know about the issue, Paul, but if you were doing geek stuff for a living, you better damn well better.
I will avoid Maxtor from now on.
Does your warning extend to their external (One Touch) drives, Jake? I’ve had issues, mostly self inflicted (.NET Framework grrrrrr) that they’ve helped me resolve. The new 1TB Maxtor OneTouch III is PCWorld Editors’ Choice. Plus, Maxtor is getting bought by Seagate, so… anyway, thought I’d throw in my 2 cents worth;-)
Yeah, Maxtor is (slowly — the deal’s been in the works for a LONG time) getting bought by Seagate, so hopefully that’ll help with quality control (though seagate has had their own problems of late). As for their external drives, I honestly don’t have any idea as I haven’t tested this kind of stuff extensively. But, in my opinion, an external drive that won’t work properly because you have the .Net libraries installed is something you should avoid (as there are starting to be more and more apps that require it).
If you say so. I ran into .Net Framework issues at least one computer ago, and nothing to do with Maxtor or an external drive. It just mucks up the system – I used it for an RSS reader and got rid of it. Reminds me of the hassle of Visual Basic Runtime libraries years ago….
But just like the VB runtimes, there are sadly a bunch of programs that need them. While I don’t like it, either, I’ve got four apps on my system (one running all the time) that use the .net libraries and have never had issues.
I’m all for best buy bashing, but jesus. that’s a little extreme expecting someone to know everything. I’m pretty sure that most geeks would only know that if it happened to them or someone near them. what you should be lambasting them about is that they didn’t take her complaint seriously. they should have gotten her specs and have had someone look in to it.
also its rather stupid to say to avoid maxtor. I remember back when western digital had a few problems and maxtor was the good thing at the time. If i swore off westerndigital, i might have bought a maxtor and have this problem too. I think its more accurate to say, ‘stay away from maxtor if you have a nforce4 board’
besides, if maxtor was working with every computer up until the nforce came out, whose problem is it really?
I am planning on getting an external hd for my laptop, but it’s an Intel. Is Western Digital really that much better than Maxtor, if it will be used with an Intel chip?
My issues with Best Buy go way back. When I bought my laptop from Best Buy –which I only did because it was so much cheaper there — I had three people hassling me for 25 minutes to get their overpriced “warranty.” I refused, refused, refused, and they tried everything short of telling me that the computer would explode as soon as I got it home if I didn’t get the warranty. It made me really angry.
But I still bought the computer from them. I suppose to make a point I should have walked out, but oh well.
I hate Best Buy.
Grrrr.
Pat, you’re right. Its kind-of short-sighted to immediately say ‘avoid Maxtor’, but look at it this way: if somebody screws you over once, why go back for more?
My thoughs on this are: If it messes up once, its their fault. If it messes up twice, its your fault. You shouldn’t have gone back!
I’ve only bought Maxtor disks for years and years because, indeed, WD was ‘notoriously bad’. I’ve had one Maxtor disk DOA and another just failed recently being only about eight months old. Now, all my disks are running horribly, because my motherboard’s chipset doesn’t match up with the DiamondMax 10s.
I don’t care if it’s Maxtor’s fault or nVidia’s. All I know is that if I had Western Digitals or Seagates instead, I would have been in the clear.
I’m sending one disk (maybe two if another one also fails in MaxBlast) back for replacement, and then it’s goodbye Maxtor. (Especially considering that their being bought… *rolls eyes*)
You do indeed have a point, Pat. Do I know absolutely whose fault it is? No. I’ve heard rumors that Maxtor was going outside the SATA spec to push performance so they can get better reviews, but it’s obviously biting them in the ass. Other companies have done this in other categories — ATI and nVidia both have at one point or another been accused of cheating. But I do know that if my full-time job was to know the ins and outs of every product I sell (and Best Buy primarily carries Maxtor drives, at least when I was there), install, maintain, etc… that I would know this kind of stuff. Anybody who’s looked at any sort of hardware enthusiast site of any sort of relevance in the last six months or so would know of this problem.
That being said, I have bought a hard drive (a Hitatchi) from Best Buy before because I had a gift card and it was on rebate. It was a 160gb HD, and I paid $140 (or so) for it, but it had an $80 rebate on it, and it was all on gift card anyway — so it was free to me 🙂
As for Western Digitals being crap, every hard drive manufacturer has gone through a phase where their stuff has been crap. Anybody remember IBM 75GXP drives and the problems they had? Hitatchi was actually to blame for that one, as they made those drives, but they’ve since gotten their act together. I’ve heard some of the issues with Western Digital hard drives, but have never had a problem with the probably dozen or so of their drives I’ve used myself (I still have an old 2.4gig WD drive running in a firewall here that I pulled from a scrap parts pile).
But you’re right — every company has issues at one point or another. My point of this whole rant is that if you’re going to be selling/servicing a product, you better damn well know if it’s going to have issues with a very popular chipset — and don’t dismiss somebody telling if you there are.
Shannon and I wanted to buy a Flat Panel TV there. The salesperson was not only a dumbass, he also wanted to sell us something that’s been on the shelf for four months. “But it’s like buying a used TV,” I said.
“Well just get the insurance for $100 more and well fix it when it breaks,” he replied.
“later dude.”
I feel your pain! I have had a couple of “Worst Buy” experiences as well, including not honoring the standard warranty (on a laptop). I will not return!
As for the geek-droid… good customer service should dictate that he make the customer happy so they will want to return to the store. It doesn’t matter whether *either* of them knew what they were talking about, or whether the item in question is crap or not. He should have offered her something (a way to make the product work, or a return) instead of just turning her away.
This type of non-service is why I spend the extra buck or two and make larger purchases (appliances etc) at local businesses whenever possible.
Slider, I totally was going to tell you to post something on Jake’s blog about the flat panel but you beat me to it!
Amazing…I’m doing some research for a class on why you shouldn’t buy from a certain seller. I was amazed to find this thread #2 on yahoo’s search engine. Reading through this, I am no surprise at what has been said about Best Buy…I mean Worst Buy. The Geek Sqaud…I mean Geek SQUAT there knows nothing about anything. I have to admit. At one time, I was a hardcore BEST BUY buyer. We’ve purchased washer, dryer, multiple tv’s, computers system and anything else. Not just that, I kept falling into the warranty crap they sell which is good if they actually honor it, BUT THEY DON’T. The latest incident I had there was several months ago. When my 1 year HP Lap Top shutdown and would not turn back on. They SQUAT told me that it was becaue I had some spyware and such but I recall seeing a warning which told me that it was a hardware issue which is covered by the warranty. They refused to listen to me that it was that…so, I spent more money on backing up my data etc…I went back three times with the same problem, they sent my laptop to HP, came back and I was missing the powercord (they lost it), then they made some adjustment to the laptop and replaced my keyboard with a scratched up one and a screw tip poking out next to the mousepad scroll. After 3 weeks or so, they finally told me that it was a hardware issue and had to get my harddrive replace which took another week…this story goes on forever…mind you I did not put the fights I had with the SQUATS and their MANAGER…after all that I had to gone through they still refused to fix the keys that had gotten broken from getting it fixed so many times..AND you wouldn’t believe what the female manager at SQUAT todl me. She said that I couldnt’ just GLUE it down so it wouldn’t bother me….So We finally talked to not just the two managers…we spoke with the regional manager and he fixed everything for us buy replacing my Laptop. The HP laptop was over $1900 and warranty was $299. The replacement was $1100 – No warranty.. I haven’t been back to WORST BUY since then and I refuse to even step into a their store.
Sorry took too long guys…but I wanted to share my story. This wasnt’ the only time this happened.
Maginda: What search terms did you use to get here? I’m too lazy to look through my server logs 🙂
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