Counterfeit Maxtor Hard Drives Found Only in Japan, Company Says.

Wonder if somebody should tell Maxtor about my experience.

I had been looking at an eBay seller (located in California) selling Maxtor 7Y250P0's (OEM 7200RPM, 250GB, 8MB Cache drives). My favorite model drive for doing ReplayTV upgrades, because 6 of my upgraded units use these drives. The 7th still uses an original ReplayTV drive....came from a 5160, I've reimaged it about a year and half ago (and put it into a 5080).

On October 2nd, I took the plunge and ordered a pair of these drives. With the intention of replace all 3 drives in my Linux server with them (I have a real 7Y250P0 that I had gotten from Geeks.com the month before....)

Well, when those two drives arrived, I immediately tried to format to test again DOA....and while I seemed to start format...Maxtor's MaxBlast software crashed on the last step. And, Explorer indicated that the partition needed to be formatted. So, I had Explorer format the partition (slowly)....it go up to almost the end and then reported that it couldn't complete.

At one point I did get a format to complete, but later Windows reported that the partition was corrupt.

After some investigation, I noticed that the drive was coming back as a 6Y250P6.....

A google search found other reports of counterfeit drives, and when I put the drives from eBay next to the real 7Y250P0 that I had gotten from Geeks.com, it quickly became apparently that the drives from eBay were counterfeit.

I sent them back to the eBay seller, who said he would refund and take the matter up with his supplier.... I'm still waiting for the refund, but I'm not expecting a problem....I'm sure the seller didn't get to 4000+ feedback points if this was usual.