Maxtor

Last updated
Maxtor Corporation
Company type Public
NYSE: MXO
Industry Technology
Founded1982;43 years ago (1982)
FounderJames McCoy, Jack Swartz, and Raymond Niedzwiecki
DefunctJune 30, 2006;18 years ago (2006-06-30) (company)
FateAcquired by Seagate Technology
Headquarters500 McCarthy Boulevard,
Milpitas, California
,
United States
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
James McCoy, Jack Swartz, and Raymond Niedzwiecki (founders)
Products Hard disk drives
Owner Seagate Technology

Maxtor Corporation was an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer. Founded in 1982, it was the third largest hard disk drive manufacturer in the world before being purchased by Seagate in 2006. [1]

Contents

Maxtor is a portmanteau of maximum and storage.

History

Overview

In 1981, three former IBM employees began searching for funding, and Maxtor was founded the following year. In 1983, Maxtor shipped its first product, the Maxtor XT-1140. In 1985, Maxtor filed its initial public offering and started trading on the New York Stock Exchange as "MXO." Maxtor bought hard drive manufacturer MiniScribe in 1990. Maxtor was getting close to bankruptcy in 1992 and closed its engineering operations in San Jose, California, in 1993. In 1996, Maxtor introduced its DiamondMax line of hard drives with DSP-based architecture. In 2000, Maxtor acquired Quantum's hard drive division, which gave Maxtor the ATA/133 hard drive interface and helped Maxtor revive its server hard drive market. In 2006, Maxtor was acquired by Seagate. [2] [3]

Early financing

An early Maxtor hard drive (right) with a more modern laptop hard drive and coins (front) for size comparison 5.25 inch MFM hard disk drive.JPG
An early Maxtor hard drive (right) with a more modern laptop hard drive and coins (front) for size comparison

The Maxtor founders, James McCoy, Jack Swartz, and Raymond Niedzwiecki—graduates of the San Jose State University School of Engineering and former employees of IBM—began the search for funding in 1981. In early 1982, B.J. Cassin and Chuck Hazel (Bay Partners) provided the initial $3 million funding and the company officially began operations on July 1, 1982. In February 1983, it shipped its first product to Convergent Technology and immediately received an additional $5.5 million in its second round of funding. The company also began negotiations with the EDB (Economic Development Board) of Singapore for favorable terms before committing to Singapore as its offshore manufacturing location. The DBS (Development Bank of Singapore) agreed to provide financing to help grow the company in Singapore. In 1983, the company established a liaison and procurement office in Tokyo, headed by Tatsuya Yamamoto.

Maxtor's product architecture used eight disks; 15 surfaces recorded data and the final surface was where the servo track information was located. The company developed its own spindle motor, which was fitted within the casting containing the disks. This was a major departure as the spindle motor was usually mounted external to the disks. The first product was designed to provide 190 MB of storage, but delays in getting magnetic heads to the Maxtor design resulted in the company taking what was available, and the first drive—the XT-1140—was shipped with a capacity of only 140 MB. The company received an additional round of financing of approximately $37 million in 1984 before going public in 1986, [4] with Goldman Sachs as the prime underwriter.

Expansion

In December 1986, Maxtor acquired U.S. Design Corporation, a loss-making manufacturer of data storage subsystems for microcomputers, for $16.1 million in a stock swap. The acquisition was finalized in January 1987. [5] [6] In June 1987, Maxtor purchased Storage Dimensions, a maker of high-performance, high-capacity HDD subsystems for the IBM PC (which chiefly made use of Maxtor's own drives), for an undisclosed sum. [6] The acquisition was a success story for Maxtor, and the subsidiary had grown to generate $80 million in sales by 1992. [7] That year, Maxtor sold off Storage Dimensions to private investors. [7]

In 1990, Maxtor entered the mass market with its purchase of the assets (but not the liabilities) of bankrupt MiniScribe in Longmont, Colorado. [8] The transition was a tough one as the early products of this union (notably the 7120AT 3.5-inch 120 MB drive) had many quality and design problems. Later products managed to sell well despite the initial problems. In 1996, the company completely redesigned its hard drive product line by introducing its DiamondMax series with a Texas Instruments digital signal processor.

Financial troubles

After nine years of development, the original XT-series of drives had achieved a capacity of 1 GB. Maxtor sold the rights to the series to Sequel of Santa Clara, California in the mid-1990s, and the company exited the server drive market. Sequel, a spin-off of Unisys, was not a disk drive manufacturer; rather, they specialized in refurbishing drives for the existing customer base. Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy in 1992, Maxtor's exit from the high-capacity 5.25-inch SCSI market temporarily left a product void in the industry. Around this time, SCSI versions of the 7000 series drives were also discontinued, and all engineering operations in San Jose were shut down in late 1993, leaving only the former MiniScribe design engineering staff. After turnover in the executive staff, Maxtor decided it had made a mistake, and when Maxtor moved its headquarters to Milpitas, California, it gradually began to rebuild its engineering staff.

Acquisition of the Quantum hard drive division

In late 2000, Maxtor acquired the hard drive business of Quantum. [9] [10] The merger, which was completed on April 1, 2001, made Maxtor larger than its rivals, notably Seagate, and returned it to the server hard drive market and also implemented the ATA/133 interface into its hard drives.

Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition Maxtor onetouch.JPG
Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition

Focus on external drives

Like many other hard drive manufacturers, Maxtor had been expanding in recent years into the external hard drive market. Its Maxtor One-Touch II external hard drive was marketed as convenient storage for the home user. Maxtor entered and became dominant in consumer business as result of a marketing strategy for the OneTouch line.[ citation needed ] The OneTouch is a high-capacity (500 GB to 1 TB) USB drive with a single-press button to back up and mirror the computer's hard drive. The line became the best-selling consumer device in the computer segment with several million devices distributed globally.

Maxtor had initially made efforts to get into the 2.5-inch hard drive market, but in the beginning of 2005, new management made the surprising decision to discontinue development in this field. This was considered by many industry watchers to be a particularly peculiar move, since the market for such hard drives (mainly notebook computers and MP3 players) was already experiencing rapid growth, with no signs of slowing down in the foreseeable future.

Acquisition by Seagate

In a deal worth nearly US$2 billion, [2] Maxtor was acquired by its rival Seagate in 2006. [11] [12] The Maxtor brand was revived by Seagate in later 2016. [13]

Competitors

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard disk drive</span> Electro-mechanical data storage device

A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ST-506/ST-412</span> Hard disk drive

The ST-506 and ST-412 were early hard disk drive products introduced by Seagate in 1980 and 1981 respectively, that later became construed as hard disk drive interfaces: the ST-506 disk interface and the ST-412 disk interface. Introduced in 1980, the ST-506 was the first 5.25 inch HDD. Its successor, the ST-412, was introduced in 1981 and implemented a refinement to the seek speed, and increased the drive capacity from 5 MB to 10 MB, but was otherwise highly similar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shugart Associates</span> American computer peripheral manufacturer

Shugart Associates was a computer peripheral manufacturer that dominated the floppy disk drive market in the late 1970s and is famous for introducing the 5+1⁄4-inch "Minifloppy" floppy disk drive. In 1979 it was one of the first companies to introduce a hard disk drive form factor compatible with a floppy disk drive, the SA1000 form factor compatible with the 8-inch floppy drive form factor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western Digital</span> American digital storage corporation

Western Digital Corporation is an American data storage company headquartered in San Jose, California. It has a decades-long history in the electronics industry as an integrated circuit and data memory technology developer. It is one of the world's largest computer hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers, along with producing solid-state drives (SSDs) and flash memory devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seagate Technology</span> American data storage company

Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States.

MiniScribe Corporation was a manufacturer of disk storage products, founded in Longmont, Colorado in 1980. MiniScribe designed and sold stepper motor-based hard disk drives with a large amount of onboard logic for the time. They eventually moved into higher-profile voice coil motor designs, and won major contracts with IBM. Massive financial fraud starting in 1987 led to bankruptcy in 1990, when their assets were bought by Maxtor and renamed Maxtor Colorado Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microdrive</span> One-inch hard disk format by IBM and Hitachi

The Microdrive was a miniature, 1-inch hard disk drive released in 1998 by IBM. The idea was originally created in 1992 by duo Timothy J. Riley and Thomas R. Albrecht at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose. A team of engineers and designers at IBM's Fujisawa, Japan facility helped make the creation of the drive possible.

Micropolis Corporation was a disk drive company located in Chatsworth, California and founded in 1976. Micropolis initially manufactured high capacity hard-sectored 5.25-inch floppy drives and controllers, later manufacturing hard drives using SCSI and ESDI interfaces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LaCie</span> American-French computer hardware company

LaCie is an American-French computer hardware company specializing in external hard drives, RAID arrays, optical drives, flash drives, and computer monitors. The company markets several lines of hard drives with a capacity of up to many terabytes of data, with a choice of interfaces. LaCie also has a series of mobile bus-powered hard drives.

Alan Field Shugart was an American engineer, entrepreneur and business executive whose career defined the modern computer disk drive industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of hard disk drives</span>

In 1953, IBM recognized the immediate application for what it termed a "Random Access File" having high capacity and rapid random access at a relatively low cost. After considering technologies such as wire matrices, rod arrays, drums, drum arrays, etc., the engineers at IBM's San Jose California laboratory invented the hard disk drive. The disk drive created a new level in the computer data hierarchy, then termed Random Access Storage but today known as secondary storage, less expensive and slower than main memory but faster and more expensive than tape drives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">M-Systems</span>

M-Systems Ltd., was a Nasdaq-listed Israeli producer of flash memory storage products founded in 1989 by Dov Moran and Aryeh Mergi, based in Kfar Saba, Israel. They were best known for developing and patenting the first flash drive, marketed in 1995 as DiskOnChip, and the first USB flash drive, marketed in 2000 as DiskOnKey. They also created the patented True Flash Filing System (TrueFFS) which presented the flash memory as a disk drive to the computer. After 17 years of business, they were acquired by their prior competitor, SanDisk, in 2006. The DiskOnChip (DOC) was developed at the R&D Center established by M-Systems called EUROM. Rick Iorillo, Rony Levy and David Deitcher were the individuals that worked on the development and marketing of the first 2 MB DOC. This product went on to receive the Most Innovative Award from EDN in 1995 and later went on to become the Flash Drive and DiskOnKey.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fabrik Inc.</span>

Fabrik Inc. was a manufacturer of external hard drives and digital content management software and services. Fabrik claims it was the third largest supplier of external storage products in North America in 2007. It is headquartered in San Mateo, with offices in Santa Ana and Culver City, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seagate Barracuda</span> Series of hard disk drives produced by Seagate Technology

The Seagate Barracuda is a series of hard disk drives and later solid state drives produced by Seagate Technology that was first introduced in 1993.

Tallgrass Technologies Corporation was an American computer hardware company that was the first to offer a hard disk drive product for the IBM PC in 1981. Tallgrass was a Kansas City based microcomputer hardware and software company founded in December 1980 by David M. Allen. The hard disk drive product was initially sold in Computerland stores, alongside the original IBM PC. Tallgrass added tape-backup systems to its product line in 1982.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terry Johnson (entrepreneur)</span> Data storage engineer and entrepreneur (1935- 2010)

Terry Johnson was an engineer and entrepreneur notable for his work on hard disk drives (HDD). Johnson's early career included engineering and management roles in magnetic recording at IBM (1964–70) and Memorex (1971–73). He then joined in the development of STC 8000 Super Disk, a high-end rotary actuator HDD funded by StorageTek.

Finis Conner is an American entrepreneur and pioneer of the disk drive industry. Conner co-founded Shugart Associates, Seagate Technology, and Conner Peripherals.

Atasi Corporation was an American 5+1⁄4-inch hard disk drive manufacturer company founded in California in 1981.

Storage Dimensions, Inc., was an American computer company active from 1985 to 1998 and based in Milpitas, California. The company sold data storage hardware—chiefly magnetic-tape- and hard-drive-based storage subsystems —and developed server software for businesses. The company was perhaps best known for their SpeedStor disk utility software for MS-DOS and Windows. From 1987 to 1992, the company was a subsidiary of Maxtor.

References

  1. ↑ "Seagate Technology To Acquire Maxtor Corporation". Seagate. 21 December 2005. Archived from the original on 13 September 2008.
  2. 1 2 "Seagate buys Maxtor for about $1.9 billion". NBC News. December 21, 2005. Retrieved November 24, 2024.
  3. ↑ "Seagate Buys Maxtor, Gains Facilities, Market Share". Forbes. May 23, 2006. Retrieved November 24, 2024.
  4. ↑ "Maxtor seeks market gains". Forbes. Retrieved 2025-01-03.
  5. ↑ Staff writer (December 22, 1986). "Maxtor Plans Acquisition For $16.1 Million in Stock". The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company: 1 – via ProQuest.
  6. 1 2 Staff writer (June 30, 1987). "Maxtor Corp. Buys Storage Dimensions". San Francisco Chronicle: 42 – via ProQuest. Maxtor Corp., a San Jose-based maker of disk drives and optical storage devices, yesterday said it acquired Storage Dimensions Inc. of Los Gatos for an undisclosed amount of cash. Storage Dimensions incorporates Maxtor products into subsystems that it sells through dealers and other resellers. Storage Dimensions will be combined in a group with U.S. Design Corp., another maker of storage systems acquired by Maxtor in May.
  7. 1 2 Staff writer (December 29, 1992). "Maxtor completes Storage Dimensions sale". UPI.com. United Press International. Archived from the original on November 19, 2024.
  8. ↑ "Company News; Maxtor Acquires Miniscribe Assets". New York Times . July 3, 1990. Retrieved 2024-02-06.
  9. ↑ Article from CRN Archived 2007-09-30 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ↑ "What is hard disk? - Definition from WhatIs.com".
  11. ↑ Shilov, Anton (13 January 2017). "Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants". AnandTech.
  12. ↑ Yang, Felisa (26 January 2006). "Seagate buys Maxtor". CNET. Retrieved 2025-01-03.
  13. ↑ Shilov, Anton (1 December 2016). "Seagate Revives Maxtor Brand for External Storage". AnandTech.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.