Just got a new maxtor drive today, hooked it up, booted the machine and the IDE scan comes up and says its a quantum. Alright, not a problem. Maxtor absorbed quantum, and I guess they are selling off the inventory. It was cheap, and its a 40gb 7200 rpm drive. I get through with the install, and I get ready to throw away the box, when I notice this little note that says:
Inside the box there is the usual little utility disk for install. Now why would they bother to include the disk, at extra expense, that wont work with the drive they put in the box, and then go to the extra expense of printing a note telling you that the disk they threw in wouldnt work?
Not that I would ever consider using a disk that came with the hard drive, but I find this rather amusing…Maybe I have just been up to long.
It was probably cheaper for them to throw in the disk (disks cost, what, $0.005 in bulk these days?) than to pay some guy to go check the labels on all the drives. Just my WAG.
But they had to pay some guy to go along and put the slip of paper in the box saying it was a quanum drive, so it would make more sense to have him pull the disk while he was at it.
Hm. I was assuming that, as the note didn’t say that the drive was a Quantum, pretty much all Maxtor products would’ve had the note and the disk to spare them the cost and trouble (admittedly probably not that much of the latter) of having to figure out which drives were (originally) Quantums.
My assumption would be that Maxtor has an ISO 9001 cert (or some equivalent) that requires them to do the exact same thing(s) to every hard drive shipped out (because, after all, isn’t consistency more important than accuracy ?).
What I can’t figure out is why they include the disk at all. They always cause problems, are unneeded, and unless you have DOS 6.x (or earlier) as an OS, they are useless (unless you have a wobbly table.)