hard drive history

Photo: Red Hill.

Maxtor Diamond Max 85120A

One of the biggest IDE drives on the market when it appeared, and fast too. Maxtor had struggled in the last years prior to takeover by Hyundai — we avoided the fragile 540MB, 1GB and 2GB Maxtor products — but these 5GB monsters were the start of a serious fight back. We liked them.

The rejuvenated Maxtor had done some very nice things and by this time deserved to be reinstated at the top table. Maxtor was the only major drive maker to increase market share and turn a profit in 1997 — a year of severe oversupply and very poor margins for the storage industry — and it looked as though Maxtor had found its niche. At the time we wrote that Maxtor "will probably never be the major force it used to be in the early nineties." That seemed a safe enough prediction: but Maxtor would later to surprise us almost to the point of astonishment when it took over mighty Quantum in 2001.

There was a range of drives in the Diamond Max family but the 5120 is the only model we carried here at Red Hill. We sold a modest number of these before the 6GB Seagate and IBM drives arrived. Alas, over the years since then, their reliability did not prove particularly good. Industry sources assured us that Maxtor had improved a lot since the bad old days of their 850MB and 2GB drives, and that we simply had particularly bad luck with our handful of 5120s. We were not entirely convinced and tended to avoid the brand for some time afterwards.