Talk:Maxtor

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Why no Competitors?[edit]

Western Digital, Iomega, Seagate, and all these guys have a list of competitors on their Wikipedia article. Pretty standard section for a Wiki on a big company.

Can we start one for Maxtor?

  • Quantum
  • Western Digital
  • Adaptec

More? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.76.124.126 (talk) 23:59, 26 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Product quality[edit]

There is no need to discuss the product quality since it's not NPOV. Xandrus (talk) 18:55, 23 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Pro[edit]

Maxtor is still the best supplier for quality hard disk drives and leading technology. I have a bunch of different Maxtor models, collected over the years, running without any problems. Further the low cost service hotline provides best of class customer support according to some technical enquiries i placed in the past. Maxtor remains my first choice!!! --83.141.80.138 23:44, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You should play the lottery since it seems you have exceptional luck. I believe "Maxtor" come from the Latin for "Crap won't last six months" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.181.253.68 (talk) 09:21, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Their quality has fallen dramatically SINCE being acquired by seagate, I got a new maxtor HDD not realising they'd been acquired and it broke after 3 months, although my OLD HDD's that were Maxtor never had a problem... 82.34.113.51 (talk) 19:50, 8 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Con[edit]

They die too easily. 71.15.44.3 12:11, 7 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Their XT-series of 5.25-inch full-height drives, although noisy, were reliable workhorses, with no equal in the industry from 1982-1992. In 1991 Maxtor was inflicted with a CEO and executive staff who decided the company would no longer build "boutique" drives, preferring to jump into the commodity disk drive market, i.e., low cost and low reliability. That marked the end of Maxtor as a significant force in the disk drive industry. (There was one interesting exception, though. In 1992 they were approached by NASA to provide a sample 3.5-inch SCSI disk drive for testing in a spaceborne application. Maxtor management turned them down, but one of the engineers sneaked a drive out to them anyway. Some time later we heard that the Maxtor drive was the only one still running; Seagate, Quantum, Western Digital, etc., had all failed. A potential public relations coup wasted!) Most of their 3.5-inch offerings never came close in reliability to the original product line, particularly those designed in Longmont, Colorado. The company also had a horrible internal culture. Design documentation was a mess, turnover was high, and layoffs were frequent. Like a bulemic, Maxtor's management got in the habit of quarterly layoffs to shore up the bottom line. The executive staff were generally non-technical, drawn mostly from the ranks of accountants and marketers. They exhibited an arrogance toward and distrust of the engineering staff, referring to them openly as "propeller heads". For some reason Maxtor was never able to attract a good executive staff, and as a result the company was its own worst enemy. I was there. --QuicksilverT @ 12:04, 28 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Great war story, Quicksilver. Thanks for sharing it. (By the way, do you know anything about a company called Sequel? See my comment below.) --Johnlogic 16:21, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
When Maxtor decided to get out of the 5.25-inch drive business around 1992-1993, they sold the rights to their older designs to Sequel in Santa Clara, California, a spin-off from Unisys (circa 1990). Although Sequel didn't have the facilities to build the XT series drives from scratch, they were capable of refurbishing them — repairing circuit boards and rebuilding head and disk stacks. Since Maxtor had sold so many XT drives in the first ten years of its existence and many of those had gone into high-end industrial and commercial applications, there was a market for long-term support services. Before the AT and SCSI interfaces evolved, systems used a number of other drive controller schemes (SMD, Disk Bus, SASI, etc.), mostly obsolete by the time Sequel took over. Since redesigning systems to use the new interface schemes would have been cost-prohibitive, it made sense to keep the old drives available for them. With the advent of low-cost industry standard 3.5-inch AT and SCSI drives that were easily swapped between vendors and rivaled 5.25-inch and larger earlier designs in performance, interest in repairability and maintainability disappeared. If such a drive failed, it would simply be discarded and replaced with a new unit, usually cheaper and with higher storage capacity and better performance. —QuicksilverT @ 20:44, 30 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if this is why the 7000 series hung on for so long despite being horribly long in the tooth by about 1995 or so. I mentioned the 7120 in the article, by the way, because I don't think they ever worked right; my brother and I got one in exchange for a zapped Quantum 120MB back in 1993, and that thing still tops our "worst ever" list (and it turned us off Maxtor for years; my brother prices drives for systems we build, and he likes Seagate and Samsung these days). It'd lose data, it'd corrupt data randomly, and no matter what you set the jumpers to (which there were far too many of), it'd freak out eventually -- almost all of that was firmware, and I supposed they were rushed to finish it by The Management. The DiamondMax drives at least have their firmware debugged most of the time... -lee 15:04, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

maxtor is, without a doubt, the worst of the mainstream hard drive manufacturers --213.208.105.20 12:26, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Make that "... was the worst of the mainstream hard drive manufacturers". --QuicksilverT @ 12:04, 28 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No, this is a title that should never be past tense for them. Maxtor, corrupting data forever. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.181.253.68 (talk) 00:36, 5 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(had heading "Horrible quality":) never again maxtor. my drive crashed within 11 months. i was pissed as soon as i installed it because it was loud as hell too. --Jawed 02:29, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I had some very poor experiences with Maxtor, to the point that I decided to never use it again c. 1994. (The other HDD manufacturer I had disqualified was Seagate, after regularly observing an MTBF -- mean time between failures -- of about 30 days on its 20 MB models. At least, now that they've merged, I have only one brand name to avoid.)

Around late 1992, I had bought a full-height 5.25" SCSI drive with about 550 MB (nearly cutting-edge back then) and a 3-year warranty. When it died (totally and without warning) after about 18-20 months, I had found that Maxtor had somehow delegated "support" for the product to a company called Sequel, which I found was very good at shipping faulty replacements. After receiving each bad replacement, I escallated my frustrations to a new level of management until I finally had a VP pull a drive from stock. My fourth (?!?!) replacement drive lasted about another 18 months. It was the worst customer experience I had until I met Apple. --Johnlogic 16:14, 15 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Why are the drive reliability issues not in the article? The Maxtor article should not be a simple glossy corporate snapshot. -71.49.165.13 19:56, 21 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

+1, I only know Maxtor because of their bad realibility (not the recent HDD of course, the previous one), we should add it, I think this article is not well written, really look like a "glossy corporate snapshot" :/ (Klem,193.49.48.244 (talk) 14:42, 14 February 2008 (UTC))[reply]
They should market their drives as secure file deletion utilities.

For sure Maxtor had ups and downs with quality over the years. But posting anecdotes about personal experiences, good or bad, is meaningless. What's needed are references to information about rate of units returned for specific models. IbnFadlan 22:19, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

How about their support? RIght now I am trying to recover someone's Onetouch4 that has been corrupted. The software is messed up and going to maxtor.com gives me links to download the software "in case it got deleted from the drive" When you click on that link they say you need to contact tech support. I'm pretty sure contacting anyone isn't downloading the software.

Should Maxtor still be listed as an active company?[edit]

I was under the impression that Maxtor is now totally gone and replaced by Seagate, however it is still listed as a subsidiary of Seagate... I have no proof to prove my point (except for the Maxtor page being gone [1] , so any input is appreciated. Nabeel_co 06:51, 7 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It appears that Seagate will be using the Maxtor name as a consumer brand. See: http://maxtorsolutions.com -- Austin Murphy 21:25, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I was surprised to still see new Maxtor products (namely external hard disks) still for sale recently. --Zilog Jones 22:10, 12 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I can tell, the "new" Maxtor is just a brand, being positioned at the "value" market. The new DiamondMax 20 and 21 are relabelled Seagates, and Maxtor's high-end SCSI stuff (which was inherited from Quantum in any case) isn't even advertised anymore. -lee 04:21, 6 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I heard something about that Seagate labels his "value" HDD (low cost, low realibility), so people gonna buy it (true, I saw it many times) because "Maxtor is the best !" and they relabelled the best Maxtor's products "Seagate", in order to make people think Seagate is the best of the best. True ? (Klem, 193.49.48.244 (talk) 14:42, 14 February 2008 (UTC))[reply]

History Repeats[edit]

The hostile takeover of Solectron by Flextronics is very similar to what happened to Maxtor Corporation. Mike Cannon was CEO of Maxtor for a while, then left for Solectron. Paul Tufano was "interim CEO" for a while. Soon after that Maxtor was bought out by Seagate. Mike Cannon was CEO of Selectron, followed by Tufano as "interim CEO" of Solectron prior to their acquisition. Might be worth noting in the article. IbnFadlan 22:13, 10 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Owned by Hyundai?[edit]

I am trying to research Maxtor being owned by Hyndai for a period of time in the 1990's? -- IrishDragon (talk • contribs) 18:04, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's true, although Hyundai didn't own 100% of Maxtor. Maxtor was in serious financial trouble in 1992-1993, flirting with insolvency, and was looking for a cash infusion. They thought they had found it in Hyundai, who reportedly purchased 40% of Maxtor stock for $150 million and a stake in management in late 1993. Hyundai was trying to get out of the unprofitable PC/AT clone business and move into the lucrative high-end workstation business, and they needed a captive hard drive supplier. In the fall of 1993, Maxtor management, headed by then-CEO Laurence "Larry" Hootnik, decided to stake the company's future on the "Racer" series of commodity drives, designed at the former Miniscribe facility in Longmont, Colorado, and to shut down engineering operations at the headquarters location in San Jose, California. The deal with Hyundai became effective on February 4, 1994 and the engineering talent was ushered out the door wholesale on February 7. Unfinished designs were left in a poorly documented state, and it didn't take long for Hyundai to realize that they were holding an empty bag: They needed the high-end drives from San Jose for their workstations, not the low-end drives from Longmont. I'm not sure when they dumped their interest in Maxtor, but it probably happened sometime in 1994 or 1995. We heard later that Hootnik was asked to leave in June 1994 and was given $3 million as a parting gift. Go figure. —QuicksilverT @ 20:05, 30 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

MaxOptix connection[edit]

When I worked at Maxtor there was an in-house MaxOptix development operation on River Oaks Parkway in San Jose, California, that eventually moved out and became an independent spin-off, manufacturing 5.25-inch magneto-optical drives. There should be a mention of this in the article. The MaxOptix logo was originally in the same font and shade of blue that Maxtor Corporation used for its logo. MaxOptix still exists as a brand, although it is now headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has changed owners a few times. Sorry, I don't know the dates that MaxOptix was incorporated or spun off, but it would have been around 1990-1991, if memory serves. —QuicksilverT @ 00:54, 16 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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