Talk:Maxtor

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[edit] Product quality

[edit] Pro

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)

[edit] Con

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

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)

Great war story, Quicksilver. Thanks for sharing it. (By the way, do you know anything about a company caled Sequel? See my comment below.) --Johnlogic 16:21, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

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)

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

Make that "... was the worst of the mainstream hard drive manufacturers". --QuicksilverT @ 12:04, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

(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)

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)

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)

+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))

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)

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

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)

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)
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)
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)
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))

[edit] History Repeats

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)