Quantum Corp.

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Quantum Corporation
Type	Public (NYSE: QTM)
Founded	1980
Headquarters	San Jose, California, USA
Industry	Data storage
Products	Magnetic tape data storage and related
Website	www.quantum.com

Quantum Corporation is a manufacturer of tape drive products, based in San Jose, California. From its founding in 1980 until 2000, it was also a major disk storage manufacturer (usually #2 in market share behind Seagate), and was based in Milpitas, California.

[edit] Origin

Quantum got its start when executives and designers from Shugart Associates, IBM and Memorex came up with an idea for an 8-inch hard drive that would achieve decent performance without the cost or complexity of using a full closed-loop servo system — a difficult task before the advent of dedicated servo ICs and readily-available DSPs). At the time, low end drives generally used stepper motors, just like floppy disk drives did. Steppers worked, but were slow, noisy, and prone to reliability problems due to changes in temperature. The idea the founders had was to combine the predefined steps of a stepper motor, and the accuracy of a closed-loop servo; they put a diffraction grating on the head arm, used a voice coil motor to move the arm, and only used closed-loop functionality once a seek finished, relying on the slits in the grating to count tracks during a "gross motor" movement. This saved quite a bit of hardware, and allowed the entire servo system to be controlled with only a single 8-bit microcontroller. The 40 MB Q2000 and 80 MB Q4000 were the first drives to use this technology.

Quantum's first products were very popular; according to one of the company's historical documents, by 1982 it had a 25% share of the market. It designed smaller ST-506-compatible versions of its hard drives, the Q500 series, using the same servo system. It also introduced (through its Plus Development division) what would be most people's introduction to the company, the Plus HardCard, in 1985. The HardCard was essentially a version of the Q500, redesigned and reformatted to fit in an ISA slot, with an embedded controller card bolted to the same frame as the drive. The product sold very well, and was updated to higher capacities every so often. It also inspired a slew of imitators.

Because of the demand for its drives, Quantum decided early on to outsource its manufacturing, unlike most of its competitors, who decided to stay completely vertically integrated and had opened plants of their own in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. In 1984, Quantum signed an agreement with Matsushita to produce its mass-market drives and the HardCard in the Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics (MKE) factory in Ipponmatsu, Japan. By the late 1990s, all of Quantum's disk products would be produced in Matsushita factories.¹

Not long after this, Quantum decided it would enter the then brand-new SCSI market. The first drive it designed especially for SCSI was the Q280 80MB drive, which was released in 1986 and had an average seek time of 30 milliseconds — quite good for the era. The Q280 was also one of the first mass-market drives (along with Conner Peripherals' products) to use embedded servo. Later on, Quantum combined the Q280's embedded controller design with the servo hardware from the Q500 series, and developed the ProDrive range, which was also its first drive family to support the ATA interface. The two design platforms (optical assist and full embedded servo) co-existed until the early 1990s, when the optical system was deemed too slow to be competitive and was discontinued.

[edit] Transformation

In 1994 Quantum purchased DEC's data storage division. This gave Quantum access to the DLT streaming tape system, as well as Digital's Storageworks high-end SCSI drive expertise in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Due to widespread Y2K fears, the DLT briefly sold so well that Quantum eventually split the company into two parts, one for the DLT and its associated products, and one for hard disk drives.

Quantum made a few missteps during the late 1990s. After hitting its peak with the Fireball 1080 and Fireball 1280 (both high-performance 5400 rpm models), it skewed briefly toward "value" drives that concentrated more on capacity than speed or performance. The Bigfoot drive was the best-known product of this era; it used a 5.25-inch form factor and larger disks to increase drive capacity without forcing an increase in areal density. However, the Bigfoot drives had slow spindles (the first ones ran at only 3600 rpm, long obsolete by then), and the larger disk diameters meant the heads had to move farther when seeking. They were thus generally disliked by "power users", and found their way mostly into inexpensive brand-name PCs. Quantum also applied the "Fireball" name (which had previously been reserved for the high-end 1080 and 1280 models) to a new "TM" model that featured better throughput, but slower seek times due to a 4500 rpm spindle. Later versions of the Fireball series reversed this trend, and eventually a 7200 rpm Fireball Plus ATA version was released, being one of the first mainstream consumer-oriented 7200 rpm drives. The first of the Plus series was the Fireball Plus KA, a drive available in sizes up to 18.2 gigabytes, and equipped with the new Ultra DMA 66 interface. Quantum also developed a range of high-performance server-class SCSI drives based on the technologies acquired from Digital Equipment Corporation, leading to Quantum's Atlas flagship series of high performance Enterprise storage products.^2 3 4

By 2000, the hard drive market was getting squeezed. Personal computer sales were dropping, value drives had razor-thin margins and were only getting thinner, and several makers (notably Western Digital) were in trouble. Quantum decided to sell its hard drive division at this time. The division was acquired by Maxtor⁵ (which had been in trouble, but was revitalized by the success of the DiamondMax line and an investment by Hyundai). Maxtor continued most of Quantum's disk storage products and brands until it was announced in December 2005 that Seagate was buying Maxtor⁶. Quantum kept the DLT tape drive range, as well as network attached storage maker Snap Appliance, which it has since spun off and then been subsequently acquired by Adaptec.

In 2000, Quantum acquired ATL, a manufacturer of tape libraries.

In 2002, Quantum acquired Benchmark Storage Innovations, who manufactured the VStape product line under a Quantum license.

In 2005, Quantum acquired Certance, the former tape business of Seagate Technology, becoming a member of the LTO consortium.

On May 2, 2006, Quantum announced it intended to acquire rival tape vendor Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC), for about $770 million. The deal closed [1] on August 22, 2006.

[edit] Notes

Note 1: In the early 1990s Quantum had built a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility for its high-end drives in Milpitas, but due to mismanagement was eventually forced to shut it down and turn manufacturing over to MKE. The high-end products then got the MKE mass market treatment, and product quality and reliability suffered.

Note 2: Like many American east-west corporate marriages, the acquisition of DEC's disk drive operation was fraught with cultural problems. The high-end development engineering teams in Milpitas were assigned the task of designing drives for the value-performance (7200 RPM) product line while the Shrewsbury site was chosen to develop products for the maximum-performance market (10K and higher RPM). In spite of their less challenging design objectives, the Milpitas team's products (Viking, Phoenix and Katana) consistently failed to meet performance, cost and quality goals, ultimately leading to the dissolution of the entire Milpitas team. Milpitas final chance to demonstrate their ability to deliver successful products came with the Orca program, a 10K implementation using an architecture that combined elements of both Quantum and Digital's designs. Unfortunately, as had been the case in previous product development efforts, the Milpitas team was unable to live up to expectations. Quantum ultimately decided to discontinue development of high-end drives in Milpitas in mid-2000, and the Milpitas team's final design, Orca, was transferred to Shrewsbury for final development and volume production.

Note 3: The Shrewsbury team's SCSI expertise came from the captive Hard Drive development business unit owned by Digital Equipment Corporation, the Low End Disk Systems (LEDS) group. This group was designing high-performance disk drives with Digital's proprietary "DSSI" interface starting in the early late 1970s (before Quantum even existed). DSSI wasn't appreciably different from SCSI (at the time, SCSI-1), and Digital decided to develop leveraged products for this interface for sale to the external market. The first LEDS SCSI design, the RZ72, a 2GB 5.25" full-height HDD, was delivered to market in late 1993.

Note 4: A common misconception was that the Shrewsbury product architecture was based on designs originally developed for Tape. This could not be farther from the truth. The original design used for Shrewsbury HDD products was adopted by Digital's DLT team, not the other way around. The success of the products designed by the Shrewsbury Hard Disk team is a testament to the capability of that original Digital Equipment architecture; Shrewsbury designs (the Atlas 10K and Atlas 15K family of HDDs) have been and continue to be rated "The Worlds Fastest HDDs" in independent evaluations by benchmark labs such as Storage Review.

Note 5: Quantum's HDD business was eventually sold to Maxtor corporation in 2001. The remaining Quantum Milpitas design teams were dismantled by Maxtor at that time. However, the Shrewsbury design team was left intact to live on as Maxtor's Enterprise Storage Group. Under Maxtor, the Shrewsbury team continued to develop and deliver many new, successful, industry-leading products in the Atlas family.

Note 6: At the very end of 2005, Seagate and Maxtor entered in to an agreement for Seagate to acquire all of Maxtor's HDD businesses, including the Shrewsbury design team (the 3rd time they've been acquired by another company). Under Seagate's auspices, the legacy of the Shrewsbury design team will live on and is expected to continue to deliver best-in-class designs for many years to come.