Comments on: Maxtor 5000DV Personal Storage Review

By: davemaze

davemaze — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:44:37 +0000

I have used this drivewith mac and windows and it saved the day when someone stole my macbook. I had tons of original recordings backed up..Just bought the 500g one touch 4 plus to back up this back up for safety. All reviewers of all drives have had problems so boo hoo s#$%^t happens.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:41:47 +0000

The summary pretty much says it all. I bought five 120GB versions of these about 4 years ago. Four have been in use the whole time. Two of them being abused by my teenage son for the last 2 years or so and all are still working just fine.

The fifth was in a shelf in an unheated garage (in Northern NJ with the regional temperature range) since then. Just took that out a couple of weeks ago and opened it today. It is also operating fine after being stored for 4+ years.

I can not speak to the issues others have reported but can only say that I have experienced none of them. Perhaps there was a bad batch of them. My only complaint with this product is that they are a bit slow.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 27 May 2008 04:16:40 +0000

I have had my Maxtor 160GB for almost 3 years, and it’s fine even after months without use. Other reviewers say that it’s the cases that fail. Maybe some people are treating the case like crap.

By: Mike Kur

Mike Kur — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:10:27 +0000

I just wanted to add my 2 cents to the complaining. My 200 GB 5000dv failed just after warranty. The Techs comments were “things like that happen”. I wonder if Seagate knew what they were buying when they bought out Maxtor?

By: J Eide

J Eide — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:51:53 +0000

Had mine for well over 2 years and have not had a single problem yet.

By: Henry

Henry — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 01:10:13 +0000

Had a very bad experience with it. Very unstable. One of our two drives never worked. Don’t buy.

By: Hitec_technical

Hitec_technical — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:27:06 +0000

We have 3 in the company, wish we didn’t! They are the most unreliable units I have ever used. Data will appear to copy (or not) then read back (or maybe not). There is NO guarantee of data integrity. Use them at your peril, Assuming its the interface not the drive we are going to scrap the casing and insert the base drive directly into machines instead. What a waste of money.

By: Spencer

Spencer — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 05:00:38 +0000

Never really used this drive much but when we came around to test it after it was out of commission for about a year and a half it seemed to work fine but couldn’t see it, so removed wires and tried again. Now it is making loud noises and sounds like it is gonna blow up or something. We are assuming it is dead.

By: Wintermute

Wintermute — Thu, 17 May 2007 18:42:01 +0000

Cheap. No fan. Overheats. Dies. No more Maxtor drives for me. They are frequently the least expensive, but also the lowest quality.

By: Henry Crawford

Henry Crawford — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 02:34:10 +0000

I use a LOT of disks in my I.T. job, and they hardly ever fail any more. Well, this one just did. I’ll pop it open to see if the drive inside is in OK shape, but 98% of the buyers of this drive will consider the data gone when the case dies, which is the best possible scenario here.

By: T.Geerts

T.Geerts — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:55:55 +0000

after having 2 maxtor 5000dv’s crash in half a year…, i’m on to Western Digital from now on. The New Western Digital is – Silent! – and works…

By: Smithy

Smithy — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 17:45:44 +0000

this drive is very poor, keep clear!!! Onto my 3rd drive!

By: jay

jay — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 09:16:43 +0000

i should have done some research b4 buying. just bought 200 maxtor one touch II two weeks ago. Worked fine for a few days then gone. pc don’t detect it nemore. and dantz backup never work. lost all my 3 gigs of valuable files. still under waranty but but DATA is the irreplaceble. no amount of money could replace it. never again buying maxtor never ever.

By: Joel

Joel — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 21:26:45 +0000

i also bought one of there crap drives, it wont even work, and Maxtor is NO help. zero tech support or customer service. boycott this crappy brand.

By: kevin

kevin — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 20:50:46 +0000

DO NOT BUY MAXTOR PRODUCTS !!! I bought a 5000DV, transfered lots of photos from family gatherings and trip to Europe. They’re gone. The f#$%ing drive failed after a few months. I hope Maxtor goes out of business or drastically changes the reliability and design of their drives. And I can’t believe DesignTecnica only lowers their rating from 8 to 7 based on all of these negative reviews. This drive should rate a 0. Worthless.

By: SummitKing

SummitKing — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 19:11:37 +0000

I have the 5000dv which appeared to have died. I took those plastic strips off the sides and removed the drive from its case. Then I connected it via IDE and guess what? I am now transfereing my data to a healthy drive.

Apparently, the case is what failed. The drive is still working just fine.

By: Brad

Brad — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:39:34 +0000

Bought a 5000DV at Costco for decent price. At first it worked fine, as a weekly backup for my C Drive. About 8 months later I would try to access it and get the message, “drive not formatted, want to format it now?” Tech support said I needed to format it NTFS rather than FAT32, the way it came at purchase. I had to call tech support AGAIN and they finally told me how to reformat it so I got ALL the available space from the disk. A few months later the drive got twitchy again around tax time, and the warranty expired. Now, the drive is dead, can’t be reformatted at all. Never again with Maxtor.

By: mira

mira — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 03:19:14 +0000

The one touch button feature is(was) really cute.It worked(one touch) right of the bat on one computer,had to update to make it work on another,but the external drive still showed up and worked as another drive on any computer,even though the Retrospect did not always functioned.But now about a year later it crashe completely.Fortunately it did not take my computer with it.I was just looking for a new one when I found this website only to discover that I am not alone with this problem.I will miss the one touch,but I am not stupid enough to step in the same mess over and over again.Like everybody else said,reliability is the number one virtue of any backup system.

Wondering how such a company can stay in business , reminds me of Wagner Co products.(airless paint sprayers for homeowners-seen on tv or in any building supply store).They have all the right ideas that are appealing to everybody and even if we know it won’t work right or last long we are still drawn to it.Well it’s time for me to say good buy one touch and stay strong.

By: Bro Fred

Bro Fred — Mon, 23 May 2005 00:33:39 +0000

Running Maxtor 5000DV at 160 GB for 20 months. Never stopped working, although One-Touch Backup never started working. Lack of power switch is an annoyance – have to unplug drive when it’s not needed. Which may account for the one partial data loss I experienced. Several gigabytes on a partition became unreadable after I unplugged the drive last week. I was able to recover most of it. Then, FORMAT fixed the problem. It’s working fine again (except, of course, One-Touch still doesn’t work). But, I bought a Seagate 120 GB external drive for mission critical storage. It has a power switch and its version of “one-touch” Dantz backup works.

By: Danspar

Danspar — Sun, 22 May 2005 00:32:27 +0000

My 5000DV external will not work in an XP environment. I have tried to find a fix but to no avail. It fails upon fails!! A totally useless product. No more Maxtors – ever.

By: martin

martin — Tue, 17 May 2005 20:47:13 +0000

Maxtor Drives are unreliable. I have come to that conclusion after the 80gig ATA HDD in my AMD machine failed, and my Maxtor One Touch 200 gig external also failed two weeks apart.

Sure they replace the drives under waranty, buts whats the point of saving anything on something so unreliable. Do I need to make a back up of a back now, just because they sell sh*^%! The most use I got out of them is about 6 months.

I certainly will not buy Maxtor again I can garantee you that, and the replacement drives are nothing more than paperweights in my mind.

Martin,

By: rumblefish

rumblefish — Sat, 14 May 2005 04:25:35 +0000

This drive was great when it was new, I used both the firewire and the USB ports. Then my 5000dv started slowing down and getting bad sectors after it was out of warranty and it finally stopped working recently. It was always used on top of a desktop surface because I knew it ran really hot!

I've opened it up and it's basically a standard 200gb Maxtor inside, sealed on the top and the bottom! How is this drive supposed to breathe?

We need to get together and form a class action lawsuit against Maxtor! This was a BAD design and failed right outside of the 1 year warranty for me.

By: Shane

Shane — Wed, 11 May 2005 04:07:10 +0000

“cannot read partiton table”

“cannot identify device”

“chkdsk cannot continue due to I/O errors”

Maxtors answer ” send it to a data recovery business” and “we will send you a refurbished drive”

Why the hell would I want another POS?

We should start a class action lawsuit!

By: paul

paul — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 05:52:53 +0000

my 5ooodv just died and took over 300 hours of stop animation with it. I can only say that i would hope that you read these reviews cause i wish i did.

By: Nomo Maxto

Nomo Maxto — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 23:34:04 +0000

If it were just useless then no harm would be done. As it stands this piece of crap PRETENDS to be a hard drive, but it quickly becomes a “WRITE ONLY” device. Don’t put anything on it you need to get back.

By: Anvik

Anvik — Sat, 05 Mar 2005 09:40:43 +0000

My 5000DV 160 Gb died on me for the second time last week, taking all my files along to the Great Drive in the sky. In addition Maxtor wanted me to reformat leaving 200 Mb unpartitioned and try again before they would replace it! I’m about to spend $5000 on a string quartet recording session and they ask me to leave some free space and cross my fingers for the third time?! I’m never spending money on maxtor again. I’m just sorry I did not check out Maxtor before I bought the 5000DV. It is a ticking bomb.

By: Ansis

Ansis — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:55:54 +0000

Hi! 80Gb HDD. 5 month and dead.Reason is too high temperature -about 70 grad Cellsius.It`s a Hell for HDD!!! Plus 7200 RPM and You`ll see what`s happen`d!!! I think the layer of magnetic material crash.And that`s it.I think in freezer this HDD can work…ha ha ha!!!

By: Hans Steg

Hans Steg — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 21:25:24 +0000

I bought this drive in may 2003 for extra storage and transportation. When I got the drive I became concerned because of lack of cooling (there is no fan). This thing runs hot! The build quality is not that good either. In december 2004 my suspicion was confirmed, the drive died, and I lost 150Gb of data. I was not surprised after reading all reports of failed Maxtor drives. The drive is still under warranty, and I hope to get a different model.

By: ATR

ATR — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 07:45:18 +0000

Do NOT buy this piece of crap! A much better solution is to buy a Sarotech external case and any hard disk of your choice. Matrox solution is much too expensive and the attached software cumbersome to use. AND ABOVE ALL YOU WILL NEVER BE SURE THAT THE DRIVE WILL SURVIVE THE NEXT HOUR.

By: JMA

JMA — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 03:07:00 +0000

1. Simple test copy of files to the 5000DV failed consistently Results were lost data unrecoverable.

2. Formatted to NTFS – drive was in firewire chain as logical drive H: on this system.

Upon reboot the system would not.

Complete remap of drives and the 5000DvV became the C: and mad the system not bootable with no recourse other that to do a parallel install of Windows 2000. Maxtor or Microsoft support do not have any idea how this could have happened.

My guess is that without warning this drive on this firewire chain became drive 0 by default and that without warning disc management reformats even a logical drive H: in this case as C: