Things...

What's this?!@?!%#&

It's my network hard drive that I bought about a year ago dissected(or disassembled). The kernel of this product, which is the hard drive is being used as an internal hard drive starting from yesterday.

Why did this happen?

The product I bought, which is called "Storage Share", is one of Maxtor's network storage device solution. It has about(because storage device manufacturers cheat) 300GB capacity. The good thing about this product is that you can connect it to a router and access it via home network. However, I don't recommend this product nor the newer versions of this product for the following reasons.

1. Unreliable. The product has a poor lifetime. After using it for about a year, it just stopped working. As I turned the power on, the LED wouldn't stop blinking. I found from the Internet that many people had this problem, and a replacement didn't help. One you grab a hand on that product, it eventually dies sooner than anyone could have expected.

2. It is very slow. The boot up time of the hard drive is extremely slow. I think about a minute. Not only the boot time is slow, but the data transfer rate is also slow. There is a trade of between convenience and speed. You can access the hard drive through your router, but very slow(100 Mbps).

3. You can only access the hard drive through network. Once it doesn't boot up, I think there is no way to recover since you can't access it.

4. Physically too big compared to the small hard drive that are out at the market these days. Takes too much space on your desk.

But I already purchased it and my warranty expired(god knows when) silently. And it seemed like Maxtor acquired Seagate or the other way around so I'm definitely sure that their customer support sucks at the moment due to the merging process of the two big firms. The customer support web site doesn't even mention about the defect and I'm not sure if they even care about it.

Anyway, it didn't feel right to just throw away the big chunk of storage space. I disassembled it and took out the hard drive and tried to use it as my secondary hard drive. Bad news was that the partition was lost and all my data wasn't there. However, I backed it up somewhere at my parents home since my dad owns his own 300GB hard drive that he doesn't use (I don't understand why he buys stuff). The good news was that the hard drive was usable.

I'm not buying Maxtor, SeaGate, Western Digital, and Hitachi hard drives any longer.
I'm not buying Maxtor again for what you just read.
I'm not buying Seagate again because it seems like they merged with Maxtor.
I'm not buying Western Digital because my first 15GB hard drive passed out as I upgraded my OS to W2K from 98SE
I'm not buying Hitachi hard drives since they acquired IBM's hard drive business.
(IBM hard drives were famous for their bad reputation)

The only hard drive manufacturer that didn't disappoint me is Samsung.
Ironically, I'm not much of a Samsung fan.
I think I'm unlucky with hard drives...
Maybe I'll buy my next hard drive when Solid State Drives become cheaper.