Maxtor

Maxtor Corporation was an American manufacturer of computer hard disk drives founded in 1982 and acquired by Seagate in 2006. As of December 2005, just prior to the acquisition, Maxtor was the world's third-largest manufacturer of hard disks. It now operates as a subsidiary of Seagate. In 2000, Maxtor purchased Quantum's hard drive business. This move made them larger than their rivals (notably Seagate), and also returned them to the server-SCSI market. In a deal worth US$1.9 billion, Maxtor was acquired by its rival Seagate in 2006. It is now used as a Seagate brand.

Maxtor targeted both the server and desktop market, concentrating on disk capacity more than disk speed for desktops. 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 a company called Sequel in the mid-1990s, thus exiting the server SCSI drive market. Sequel 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 having moved its headquarters to nearby Milpitas, gradually began rebuilding its Silicon Valley engineering staff.

Maxtor, in recent years, like many other hard drive makers, had been expanding into the external hard disk market, with the Maxtor One-Touch II personal hard drive, which is marketed as convenient external storage for the home user.

Maxtor had initially made efforts to get into the 2.5-inch hard disk market (notebook computer format) 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[who?] 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.

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