hard drive history

Photo: Red Hill.

Maxtor 71336

A drive from Maxtor's darkest days, the period when the company was faced with bankruptcy and was selling all its assets to stave off the bankers — even its production facilities. Eventually, the owners sold the entire company (or what remained of it) to Hyundai.

Maxtor's drives, once such immaculately presented products, now looked cheap and nasty, and though we had long since switched to other brands ourselves, we saw quite a few third party systems come in to have faulty Maxtor drives replaced. Price-wise Maxtor were very competitive, but when a firm has so little else to boast about that it is reduced to selling on price alone, its future is usually grim.

→ Maxtor 71336 with late-model 5x86 main board. Notice the power connector which, for some unexplained damn reason, on Maxtor drives was always mounted upside down. This one is an AP model with the larger 128k cache and was manufactured on 30th May 1996.

Under Hyundai's new management, Maxtor would eventually recover; Hyundai was able to sell off its Maxtor stock at a tidy profit some years later, and after what was probably the most remarkable back-from-the-dead experience the storage industry has ever seen, Maxtor merged with Quantum to become the biggest hard drive manufacturer in the world.