If your Maxtor is 10 years old, it was built when Maxtor was
still their own company. That may speak to the quality.
They were bought by Seagate in 2006.
Hard drives are motorized, spinning devices with bearings.
They fail just like any other moving mechanical device.
I work with thousands of them daily and see them fail often.
Even with NO operating system installed. (purely storage)
Unless you have a RAID setup or a good backup plan, warranty
on a hard drive is pretty much a joke. If it fails under warranty
they give you a new one. Whoopie, they saved you $99.
Your data is still just as gone!
All of our enterprise class servers at work now run some form
of Solid State Device. (SSD) Not that they never fail, but they
have no moving parts so the mean time to failure is longer.
They are also faster for most operations.
The down side is that they are smaller and more expensive.
Be leery of drives advertised as 500GB SSD. They are most
likely SSHD. Solid State Hybrid Drives. They have a small SSD
portion for cached operations, but the main storage is the old
spinning disk technology and a slow spinning disk at that.
They are susceptible to the same failures as your WD's.
Hope you have better luck with the next one!