After yet another good experience with Maxtor today, I felt it only appropriate that I provide a positive writeup on this site. I spend most of my time detailing the ridiculous lengths to which I end up going just to make the most basic features of contemporary hardware/software work. More often than not, I'm sad to say, this requires solving the issues on my own, as contacting support generally devolves into an exercise in finger pointing. That is, the motherboard vendor blames the chipset vendor who reciprocates nicely, the OS developer blames the computer vendor who reciprocates nicely, and so forth. Maxtor is a different kind of company, however, and, as such, they deserve the praise that will follow.
I should first say that I gave up on Western Digital (WD) years ago. Whenever a drive failed, it was always a WD drive. This may be a statistical anomaly, but I'm not the only person to say that. I suspect that those low prices are possible for a good reason, and it shouldn't be too hard to figure out what that reason might be in light of such failures. At any rate, I switched to Maxtor years ago after several failures with WD, and I've never had an issue with any of the Maxtor drives. At least, I've never had an issue prior to a week or so ago when my BIOS started issuing a dreadfully dire warning about how my drive was expected to fail catastrophically at any second. My first response to that was unprintable; my second response to that was "EEEEK!" I had only recently gotten Windows XP working well enough to call my system functional (as detailed elsewhere), and I looked forward to a hard drive failure about as much as I would look forward to, say, a long, slow root canal.
Amusingly enough, the message began with the text "SMART Failure Detected". I say that's amusing because if the drive or BIOS were really smart, they wouldn't fail. Heh. Setting that pointless attempt at humor aside, I didn't know what to do. I ran the Norton Disk Doctor, and it found nothing wrong. I thought about acquiring a copy of Spinrite, but their technical support advised me that I might be better served by contacting the drive vendor. After a quick trip to the Maxtor web site, I was able to use their diagnostic utility, and it confirmed the problem, giving me a diagnostic code with which to contact a customer support representative. At this point, I figured that my BIOS must be detecting something genuinely troubling, and that I would likely be a lot more frustrated and a few hundred dollars poorer in the near future.
I forgot, for a moment, with which company I was dealing; i.e., I wasn't dealing with Microsoft or any of their ilk. Within minutes of dialing the number, I was speaking to a Maxtor technician named Frank. Frank took my information, confirmed that the diagnostic code indicated a genuine problem, and issued me an RMA number. Yes, that's right: he issued me an RMA number with hardly any fuss. The whole thing was over in less than five minutes, and most of that time was spent fumbling around trying to get to the drive so that I could read him the numbers he needed. That Frank helped me itself is stunning, but what's more stunning still is what didn't happen. That is, he didn't blame the BIOS, he didn't blame the motherboard vendor, he didn't blame Microsoft, he didn't put me on hold forever and then drop my call, he didn't tell me I was basically screwed, and so forth. I'm so accustomed to those things happening that I was literally shocked by Frank's approach to the problem.
Even as I type, a replacement drive is on its way, gratis. That is, free. Or to put it differently, Maxtor is sending me a replacement drive, and they are not charging me for it. It's costing me nothing. No money will be required on my part to fix this problem. My financial committment to this situation is nil. My pocketbook is safe. My wallet is unaffected. I will not be getting billed for this. I'm still so stunned by it all that I'm not sure I'm even making sense right now. How can this be? How can a company's technical support actually provide support? That's not what technical support does, does it? That's not their job, is it? Despite my utter astonishment right now, I can say this much with certainty: I will be buying Maxtor hard drives and recommending them to anybody who asks. Maxtor makes a good product, and in the rare case when something goes wrong, they own up to it and make it right. That's why I use Maxtor, and that's why I will continue to use Maxtor. Good form!
02/05/2002