Apparently there are some endemic problems with Maxtor’s FireWire hard drives. Several readers have written in about their own difficulties with their external hard drives. To Maxtor’s credit, their customer service is pretty good and they seem pretty willing to replace problematic drives without causing a hassle.
Steven Frank writes:
“I just had one of the pre-assembled Maxtor external firewire drives die on me. I use a Mac, but I don’t think it makes any difference. Half the time, upon plugging it in, it would work normally. The other half it would complain that there were no mountable partitions on the drive. Needless to say, I replaced it pretty quickly. The oddest thing of all was the sound of two beeps coming from the drive whenever it refused to mount. Maxtor says their drives have no audio-producing hardware, so the operating theory seems to be that the beeps are actually caused by the heads seeking back and forth across the platters, trying to lock onto something but failing.”
And from Wes Childers:
“I’ve had a Maxtor 40gb drive for about 2 years now and it has always been a little troublesome. My main problem has been having the computer recognize the drive at startup (I’m on a Mac G3 266 with a 3rd party firewire card). After a lot of trouble I found that the drive likes to be plugged in in a certain order…. (these instructions are in the installation readme… just not very obvious for a device that’s supposedly plug-and-play and hot swappable). Best I recall… the firewire cable should be attached to the drive first… then to the computer and then powered up.”
