My customer has a 4 month-old OT4 unit that failed. Power supply tests fine. Unit won't spin up, light goes on & then immediately off when power is supplied to it. It seems the PCB inside the case was the problem.
In warranty replacement, Maxtor will not preserve data telling the customer that dead units merely "get thrown into a pile and a new one will be sent to you". Since my customer needed his STORED data for obvious reasons, he had to hire me to perform some surgery on his young backup device. A one hundred-year warranty wouldn't even suffice in this event.
I've successfully dissected many externals in the past with no problem, even being able to preserve the warranty labels with no sign of tampering.
Dissection of this unit seems to be made to be impossible by design so as to cause some form of harm to the case for warranty purposes I'm sure. :sigh: The round
WARRANTY VOID IF REMOVED sticker has been designed to thwart anyone's attempt at its careful removal so bear in mind you will void your warranty if you need to retrieve your data on a failed OT4. The upshot is that you can simply install it as an internal hard drive in your desktop PC and keep going.
The rear tabs that you cannot see inside the case are ultra-thin and break off with the lightest pressure. Once you remove the earlier mentioned two screws under the SN label and two more under the rubber foot, you can then remove the bottom panel and slide the chassis out of the case. The inherent self-destruction may not be the case with older versions of the OneTouch 4, which perhaps were more successfully taken apart without issue.
Remove the obvious screws on the metal chassis if you need to get the hard drive into another case or installed as an internal drive to access your data.
Lastly,
no hard drive is bullet proof but in my experience the hard drive brands that I see the highest failure rate are, in this order:
Seagate (extremely high failure rate)
Maxtor (very high failure rate)
Fujitsu (nominal failure rate)
and, rarely, Samsung, Toshiba, and IBM/Hitatchi DeskStar and TravelStar drives.
Amazingly, I have only seen a single failure of a Western Digital drive in my 15 years working in this industry and I suspect that owner had opened the case on the HD
as he slipped and admitted doing such to his other drives but, when asked, denied doing it to that WD which was still under warranty with me.
I earnestly recommend WD and Hitatchi drives to better ensure successful preservation of your often irreplaceable data. I hope this info is helpful to you.
Cheers!
Dan