My 250gb hard drive has been having problems for a few months now. It works fine for the most part, but when I try to access certain files or folders, my computer freezes completely and I have to do a hard reboot. While troubleshooting, I discovered that back when I replaced the stupid glowing fan in my computer with a sensible black one, I apparently installed it backwards, so it was blowing air AWAY from the hard drives instead of onto them. Oops. I don't know if that was a big enough issue to cause it to overheat, but it's possible it was related.

I've mostly just been living with it, and avoiding accessing the files on that drive (which includes my 50gb MP3 collection), and just dealing with the occasional freezes when something else accesses the drive. But I had to disable the weekly antivirus scan (since that by definition accesses all the files on the drive), along with the automatic disk defragmenter. I also can't sync my MP3 player to the computer anymore. So all in all it has been quite inconvenient.

Today I got annoyed when it froze twice in rapid succession, so I started looking for troubleshooting information online. Someone mentioned using the manufacturer-provided diagnostics software. "Great idea," I thought, and downloaded and ran it. It reported that my drive was failing, gave me a diagnostics code, along with a URL to go to to check the status of the warranty on my drive. Warranties? I had forgotten about those.

It turns out the warranty is still valid but expires in about a week. What excellent timing. With the code reported by the diagnostics program, you don't even have to talk to tech support. You can just enter your serial number, the diagnostics code, and your address, and they send you a new drive. I was very pleased.

The default procedure is for you to mail them the defective drive first, but they offer "Advance Return," where you provide your credit card number as a sort of collateral, and they send you a new drive first, along with the packaging necessary to return the old one within 30 days. That makes things way easier, because I didn't have anywhere to store those 200gb while I waited for the new drive to arrive.

So overall, I'm very happy with Maxtor, and this might very well influence my future purchasing decisions. Which I guess is the whole point of providing good service.

But mostly, I'm just excited about finally being able to access my files without feeling like I'm snipping wires in a bomb, hoping this one isn't the ubiquitous blue wire that will make my computer explode.