Seagate announced its intent to acquire Maxtor some time ago, and since then, many have wondered what would become of the Maxtor’s internal hard drive products. Would Seagate discard the Maxtor brand completely, or would it continue to offer DiamondMax drives? Initially, even Seagate wasn’t sure. However, the company has now settled on a strategy that will use the Maxtor brand to bolster Seagate’s current lineup of internal hard drive products.
When contemplating what to do with Maxtor’s hard drive products, Seagate says it discovered that there was only an 11% overlap between the companies’ customers. Maxtor customers, it says, were concentrated in different geographic areas or specialized market segments that Seagate didn’t really target. Rather than risking losing those customers, the Maxtor name will live on, albeit as somewhat of a secondary, value-oriented brand.
On the desktop, this value brand will manifest itself as the Maxtor DiamondMax 20, which will be available in capacities between 40GB and 320GB with either 2MB or 8MB of cache. Seagate is also introducing the MobileMax—Maxtor’s first notebook drive—that will be available in 40GB to 80GB capacities with a 5,400-RPM spindle speed and 2MB of cache. These new drives will overlap the low end of Seagate’s existing Barracuda and Momentus lines, but lack premium features like full-disk encryption and 16MB caches. The Maxtor drives will also only be covered by a three-year warranty, but they’ll be cheaper than their Seagate counterparts.
Seagate intends its new Maxtor drives to be high-volume products that appeal to more value-conscious market segments, but the drives themselves are based on Seagate’s existing core technology. The DiamondMax 20, for example, is built on Barracuda 7200.10 internals, complete with perpendicular platters. New features will come to Seagate drives first, though, and potentially never make their way to the Maxtor line.
In a sense, it’s disappointing that Seagate is keeping the Maxtor brand alive in name only. However, the dual-brand strategy still gives consumers a measure of choice. Seagate has also retained a number of Maxtor’s engineers and now has access to the company’s patents, so you can expect to see Maxtor technologies find new life in future Seagate drives.
ROFL, maxtors reliable, yeah reliable in that they are sure to fail in no time.
Your point went right past me 🙂
got it now
yeah, own a couple maxline drives myself.
overall i’ve allways felt the high end maxtors were better than the other drives.
not so much the cheap models, but the high end were definately top-notch.
thanks for the tip. Now I know what not to recommend. I doubt seage will improve what cannot be improved on these cheap and lousy drives (non-SCSI).
First off, I have only ever had one Maxtor drive fail on me and it was an OLD 20gig drive that had been “rode hard and put up wet”. I have always been loyal to them because of the reliability and value that they represent. I have owned many other drives from the various other companies, but my heart has always belonged to Maxtor. It’s dissapointing to see them done away with. I’m just glad that I picked up two of their 6L300s last week, while I could still buy more than just a name.
I have a 7200rpm laptop drive, honestly the desktop market needs to move to 10k
OMG Seagate is letting some Maxtor engineers put their tech in Seagate drives? There goes the reliability factor of Seagate drives -_-
Maxtor hard drives have always been the poor mans special, this really isn’t any different. Trading reliability and overall life expectency for speed and price.
those are using 3600, 4200, or b[<5400<]b. 🙂
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just like the majority of notebook drives
5200rpm?
Amen to the first 2 posts.
In my experience Maxtor drives have been failing QA checks for years. Good riddance to them and their technology; I just hope they don’t infect Seagate.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the new Maxtor drives will be Seagate drives that fall a little short on the QA testing. Probably will end up more reliable than current Maxtors, at any rate.