Several months ago, Seagate bought out Maxtor and began to phase out the Maxtor product line. As we had been using Maxtor QuickView drives up until that point, we had to make a decision on which drives to use going forward. We chose the Seagate DB35 line of drives, and we couldn’t be happier.
The Seagate DB35 drives are specifically optimized for use in DVRs, and now over 90% of the drives we ship are from this family. To see if the drive you’ll be getting in any upgrade kit is one of these drives, just click the “more info” link in the list, and the type of drive supplied will be shown on the next page.
We are really seeing pretty excellent performance with these DB35 drives. Way back when we started out, the majority of the drives we shipped were Samsung drives. These weren’t optimized for the DVR world, and whether it was because of that or just general drive issues, we had an unacceptable amount of problems. So as soon as we could source them, we switched over to the Maxtor QuickView line. This reduced the failures very significantly – plenty, in fact, to compensate for the fact that the drives themselves cost significantly more than the Samsungs we had been using.
Now, this latest transition is repeating the previous one. Seagate DB35 drives do cost substantially more than the Maxtor QuickView drives we had been purchasing, but we’re having an even further reduction in problematic drives, so we’re very happy. And so are our customers.