Observations from tour of Drive Savers facility today

[tortoise]

Great tour put on for their associates that send in referrals, outstanding facility currently undergoing expansion with new larger clean room. Fascinating collection of staff most of whom have been there for 10+ years and they are obviously happy with their work. The Mac lab and the PC lab are separate and staffed by respective specialists. In the Mac lab the predominant machines in use are the MDD series due to native OS-9 capability and more universal PCI slots (many of their machines run with case open all the time and multiple drives connected to PCI cards). Many Dr Bott moniSwitchs observed as their KVM preference. Interesting note, unofficial but confirms my experience on a smaller scale, during the tour I was watching the relative counts of different manufactures drives on the work benches and Maxtor was by far the leader in failed drives there today by a factor of at least four to any other brand. Could be just a fluke and next week it could be different but their benches were littered with failed Maxtors today.
Summary of day is I left with even more respect for a company staffed by knowledgeable professionals that enjoy their work and are treated with respect. Their customer service is beyond reproach and the number of staff manning the phone lines is adequate to minimize hold times and they will soon be manned 24 hrs a day during the week. When you need reliable data recovery they are the industry leaders for a reason. i have never sent them a job yet that did not come back with 100% recovery.

[microchip13]

While I didn't have success with them when I needed some data rescue, they were great people to work with nonetheless and seemed very knowledgeable. I'm very jealous that you got to go tour the facility.

[chas_m]

Wow, thanks for the report!!

We have sent them many drives from our store, most came back 100% but a couple (to our astonishment) came back with no hope.

We have always thought very highly of them and consider them the ONLY option for Mac HD recovery when things are really bad (we do a fair amount of recovery work ourselves if the drives aren't totally dead).

Let's hope nobody here ever needs them, but boy am I glad they are there!

PS. Our observations on Mac HD failures mirrors yours.

[mikebw]

I wonder if Maxtor simply sells more volume than other brands?

[GGD]

Maxtor been berry berry good to Drive Savers.

[Mr645]

Based on dealing with them once I would also say top notch service. I also can say that with nearly 50 hard drives in my office, I think 8 out of 10 failed drives are Maxtors. We had our first Seagate fail recently, but I think it is related to a power problem as 2 power supplies also failed over the same weekend, one was the PS feeding the array with the failed drive in it

[mattkime]

>>I wonder if Maxtor simply sells more volume than other brands?

Or maybe they're most commonly used by people that don't make backups.

[olnacl]

Another reason to backup regularly and never believe that a long warranty has an effect on frequency of drive failures. I've lost more Maxtors than any other brand.

[ADent]

Yeah I switched away from Maxtors in my TiVos (which are VERY hard on drives) - though they do have an efficient warranty exchange process.