Seagate OneTouchâ„¢ II 200 GB Firewire 400 Hard Drive

Pros: Fast throughput in USB 2.0 hi-speed, or IEEE-1394 modes.
Cons: Data loss. Terrible customer support. High failure rate.

Our department purchased more than 15 of these drives to backup data from desktop and laptop systems. Within 8-10 months, 5 of the drives had experienced data loss. Note that these drives are always powered down before being moved, and are treated very ...

Pros: Pros are irrelevant when the thing doesn't work.
Cons: After a short amount of time and little use under ideal conditions, it failed.

I've had this drive for only about a year, and it's had very light duty--just an occasional backup. Now it's dead. The blue light comes on, and I can feel it spinning up, but it's not responding. I tried on a couple of couple of Windows XP-based computers, and it doesn't work on either one.

It's not in a hot room, it hasn't been bumped around, and it has not been subjected to any kind of harsh environment.

Pros: Easy to transport & holds more data than a common dvd
Cons: The hum, the clicking, then no more data

I Work with large audio and video files that are shared between 3 people. We were just starting out and thought the Maxtor drives were the way to go. We were already working with Mac G5 and G4 laptops, working mostly from home offices and on the road and needed an easy way to handle more files.

The short story?--200 GB seemed a good gamble. We purchased more and more drives as we needed them, ending up with about 12 Maxtors total. We also had a handful of LaCie drives and about 6 ProMax drives.

In conclusion, over a period of a year of use, 4 Maxtors went down. After the first one went down, I started to panic thinking that we had already invested and had been filling up the 12 Maxtors. We then started purchasing other brands. One by one the other 3 went down. When I say 'went down', I mean that without notice, the data was offline and unable to be recovered.

The LaCie and ProMax drives are still working.

Those are my numbers from personal experience. If you have a choice, go with the LaCie.

Pros: Large disk
Cons: Large disk fails.

This Maxtor drive failed twice. The first time I had to reformat in order to use it. All data lost.

The second failure, after 1 year use, left it totally inaccessible from both MS XP and Linux. Pulled out the harddrive from the box, inserted in PC, still no access. Smelled of burned electronics.

I see an overwhelming number of bad experiences in forums for this Maxtor product.

I assume it goes for the rest of maxtor products too.