Customer Reviews

Maxtor L01P200 Internal 7200 RPM 200 GB Hard Drive

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

This is a great drive. It's fast (about twice as fast as my other 2 and 3 year old 7200rpm drives) and it's silent and seems to be reliable. It's also at a great price for the capacity, and it's Maxtor, a trusted name in hard drives. I got the ATA card with mine, but I used another Silicon Image card I purchased previously (it has the same features but gave less problems, my computer took longer than it should to start up with the Maxtor ATA card). The MaxBlast software worked perfectly and never gave me any trouble. All those giving bad reviews because of the software or lack of card need to stop complaining. The point is, the actual hard drive is great, and you won't go wrong purchasing it. I like it so much, I decided to purchase the 160 gig version to replace two of my other hard drives.

And this one is no different. I had purchased a 160GB Samsung to start building my new PC. I took this drive home only to find that their partitioning software that you have to download from their website did not even work. Instead of searching the internet for third party software to do this, I took the drive back to the store and got the 200GB Maxtor instead. Installation was simple, I just popped it into my PC and it was recognized immediately. I installed the Max Blast software and the drive was partitioned, formatted and ready to use in less than 5 minutes. NOTE: Your registry has to be modified to be able to recognize drives larger than 137 MB, but the Maxtor software does this for you.

I will always buy Maxtor from now on; great products with no BS.

Maxtor is typically a trusted name for me, having purchased dozens upon dozens of drives for various purposes during the course of my IT career. So, when I wanted to upgrade my personal portable USB drive (which contains my digital media), purchasing the Maxtor 200GB seemed to be a no-brainer. Let me add that I've used a slew of different drive brands and sizes in a slew of external cases with no issues...

Unfortunately, Maxtor seems to have slipped in the QA department. Typically, if a drive is going to fail, it will fail within the first 30 days. This one did. So did the next one. And THAT was a first EVER in over 10 years in the IT industry. I was pretty much floored.

I found that both failed units exuded excessive heat given the 7200RPM of this drive and both failed after heavy I/O usage causing the heat to increase even more. Now, we all know drives get warm, but this baby (both) were HOT to the touch. Something is amiss in Maxtor factory.

Fortunately, this drive was an active access drive with data duplicated on another drive (also a Maxtor, but 300GB and is working fabulous, with limited heat... go figure) so I did not lose any data.

Given that my 300GB mentioned above, and my personal experience with Maxtor in the past, I'm speculating that the large number of negative reviews indicate simply a manufacturing defect. Move up to the 300GB model, you'll get more space, and hopefully avoid whatever's plaguing Maxtor's 200GB line.

I've used Maxtors and Seagates for years (and I mean years) on the systems I build. Frankly, I've never had any 3.5 drive fail on me (2.5 drives, yes, -but none of the full sized drives). Well 2 of these drives started corrupting data and anaylsis showed they are rapidly going bad - lots and lots of bad sectors. These 200 GB drives are 3 months and 4 months old and on a system fully protected against power failure. I have small Maxtors and Quantums (6GB), that still run great, though are of limited
utlity due to their size and speed. Somewhere down the road Maxtor quality control went down the tubes. If you read the reviews you'll see how many people are losing these drives in a short period and how Maxtor seemingly sells more of their refurbished drives than new ones. It is Seagate now for me and its 5 year warranty. At least I can still say that after running Segates as my primary drives on my Macs and PCs, not a single drive has been a prloblem (I'm keeping my fingers crossed). Seaate has aquired Maxtor, but the commitment to quality products hasn't rubbed off. BTW, Maxtor RMA is a hassle. Unless your drive is totally dead you'll need to run the Maxtor druve utility and get the error codes. Even if the drive is smoking and is filled with bad sectors. Maxxtor won't help. Wiothout that code -- no RMA! Obviously you should get another drive -- a Seagate is a good idea.

I purchased this Maxtor drive and took advantage of a great rebate. Also got a UltraATA/133 card in the bundle.
Warning : not all boxes contain this UltraATA/133 card !!

I can understand the frustration of not being able to access the entire 200GBs of the drive because of an old bios. But it is exactly the same problem for all drives, regardless of the brand. That's not specific to Maxtor. My PC (Athlon XP 1800/Gigabyte GA7DX, W2K) worked just fine. The installation is simple, but I may not be the best person to judge since I assembled my PC myself. Installation of a HDD is pretty standard. If you find it difficult, all drives will seem difficult to install. For this one, having a floppy to do the primary install is good because if you start from scratch, the floppy always works. The CD-ROM is sometimes more difficult.

What I like the most ?
- Performance is simply excellent
- Capacity is, I think, very good and is currently the range that offers the best price per gigabyte
- The drive is very quiet !
- The bundled ATA/133 controller card allows me to get the full performance for the 3 disks I have
- Capacity allows me to backup my entire 10G system disk frequently, which is nice.

In short : an excellent drive, but the competition is so tight with other brands that you can probably rely purely on the price to make a purchase decision. Go for the biggest rebates...

In the last few months I bought 4 maxtor harddrives from different places, and i must say that i agree with Mr. Robert Bornstein, at first I didn't have any problems with them but 3 months later I started havening alot of problems with 2 hard drives... don't buy maxtor..

This drive was too good of a price to pass up when I needed more room for pictures and videos; I was actualy a bit leery about this purchase, given the size of the drive at this price, but I have been very satisfied. The drive installs easily enough for those not afraid of taking the cover off the computer, and should work with most computers.

I've had this drive in my system for about a year to store MP3's and videos. I should have backed up all of my files because my old harddrive has failed, and with 200GB of storage, you won't run out very quickly. Mine came with the ATA card, and it was easy to install. It has worked fine, and quietly ever since and I am pleased with the purchase.

First thought - no one should be able to write a review on a hard drive until it's a year old. If that were the rule, you would see almost no positive reviews for these new maxtor drives. Purchased 5 drives over a one year period and have had three fail. Maxtor replaced those without any issue, except that the replacement drives (which were refurbished) also failed within 3 months. Quite and fast mean nothing if you end up losing your data. BTW - each drive had dedicated cooler fan and pc's were on UPS so there aren't any excuses. There's a reason why these drives have one year warranties. Beware.

I've owned this drive for many months and it has performed flawlessly. It (like other large & fast drives) gets pretty warm after running for a while. If you just make sure your case is well ventillated you shouldn't have any problems.

I've built many systems with many different hard drives and have only had a couple fail. They weren't Maxtor, but it just as easily could have been. If you value your data, either back it up, or go with a RAID system. Failures can and do happen, no matter what brand of drive you buy.

As far as the whiners that gave this drive poor marks, what can I say? Looks like instead of rating it on the merits of the drive itself, they took out they frustration because of either poor marketing, or an obvious case of not reading their own system manual before making the purchase.

Make no mistake. This is an great drive (for PCs built in this century) and when on sale, offers ample room for drive hogging chores, such as video editing and archiving. I highly recommend it.