Maxtor Corporation

» see maxtor.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Seagate bought its third largest rival in may 2006 and stopped a company that had been running for twenty three years, which in the disk drive industry is a long career. Both sets of shareholders approved the merger on 17 may and Maxtor shares came off the New York Stock Exchange before the market opened on Monday the 22nd. The deal was all stock and worth about $1.9 billion when it was announced the previous december.

Three IBM men who had come out of the San Jose State engineering school started looking for money in 1981 and found $3 million at Bay Partners, then opened for business on 1 july 1982. The name is maximum and storage jammed together. Their first product, the XT-1140, was designed around eight platters and was supposed to hold 190 megabytes, but the magnetic heads they wanted never turned up on schedule, so they shipped in february 1983 with whatever heads existed and called it 140 megabytes.

The middle of the story is a series of near deaths. Maxtor bought the assets of MiniScribe out of bankruptcy in 1990 to get into the mass market, and inherited a product line with real quality problems. By 1992 it was close to going under itself and sold off the high capacity SCSI business to stay alive. All of its San Jose engineering was shut down in late 1993, leaving the former MiniScribe engineers in Colorado as the design team. Hyundai bought forty percent in 1993 and the rest in 1996. The DiamondMax line arrived that same year with a Texas Instruments signal processor doing the servo work, and it was the product that put the company back together.

For a stretch in the middle of the 2000s I kept a hardware list in my forum signature, the way people did on the Turkish boards then, and the drive was a line in it like the motherboard and the memory. Nobody put a hard drive brand in a signature because a drive was interesting. You put it there because the drive was the one component that could take everything with it when it went, and the brand name was the entire sum of what you knew about your odds.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

In late 2000 Maxtor bought the hard drive division of Quantum, closing on 1 april 2001. That single deal made it briefly larger than Seagate and put it back into the server drive market it had walked away from a decade earlier. It also handed over the ATA/133 interface that went onto the consumer drives. For a couple of years it was the biggest maker of desktop drives in the world.

The other good decision was external storage. USB 2.0 finally made it practical to back up a whole disk over a cable, and the OneTouch line was built around exactly one gesture: a physical button on the front of the box that mirrored the drive when you pressed it. It sold in the millions, mostly to people who had never bought a storage product before and were never going to open a configuration screen.

~ the unraveling ~

In early 2005 management stopped development of 2.5 inch drives. This was the year laptops were taking over from desktops and every music player on the market had a small drive spinning inside it, and analysts said so at the time. Walking away from the small form factor meant walking away from the only part of the industry that was still growing, and it left the company holding a desktop business at the exact moment desktops stopped being where the volume was.

That mistake was of a piece with the older ones. The 5.25 inch SCSI line had been sold off in the early nineties to survive a cash crisis, and the rights went to a Unisys spin off that refurbished drives rather than made them. Maxtor kept correcting course by exiting markets, then paying to re-enter them a few years later at a worse price.

~ the day it died ~

Seagate announced the acquisition on 21 december 2005, the European Commission cleared it on 27 april 2006, and the shareholders voted on 17 may. Sources put the actual close on either the Friday or the Monday that followed, which is a two day argument nobody has ever needed to settle. Seagate had wanted the external drive business and the manufacturing capacity, and it got both plus the removal of the third largest competitor.

The brand came back in 2016 as a label on Seagate external enclosures, which is the ordinary afterlife of a hard drive name. Nothing inside those boxes traces to Milpitas. What is genuinely gone is the corporation and its ticker, along with every DiamondMax that was still spinning when the deal closed.

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