Month: April 2006

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.