On December 21, 2005, Seagate announced a $1.8 billion agreement to acquire rival Maxtor. The deal closed May 22, 2006. Seagate then proceeded to RIF 6,000 former Maxtor employees, half the former company’s workforce.
Maxtor’s history
Maxtor was founded in 1982 by three former IBM engineers and released its inaugural product, the XT-1140, in 1983. The company went public two years later, listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “MXO.” The Maxtor name was an amalgamation of the words Maximum and Storage. Maxtor itself had made some acquisitions, including Miniscribe in 1990 and Quantum‘s hard drive business in 2000. The $1.3 billion acquisition of Quantum’s HDD business unit made Maxtor larger than Seagate, however briefly. But the expected $6 billion in annual revenue for the combined company never panned out.
In terms of headcount, Seagate was the much larger company, with approximately 45,000 employees to Maxtor’s 12,000. Maxtor was still the second largest maker of hard drives in 2005, making the Maxtor acquisition the second time Seagate had acquired its second-largest rival. Seagate bought Conner in 1996.
Maxtor’s uneven financial performance
Maxtor had been struggling financially at the time of the deal. In Q1 2025, it lost $24.2 million on sales of $1.07 billion. And by summer, it was looking for ways to restructure its debt. It also suffered high turnover in its executive ranks, with CEO Paul Tufano being forced out in June 2004. Tufano was already acting CFO following the rapid departure of Robert Edwards and Michael Bless. Chairman C.S. Park, who had turned Maxtor around in the mid 90s as CEO, took over as acting CEO. As part of the turnaround, Maxtor went private, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Hyundai Electronics America.
On July 31, 1998, Maxtor went public again, trading at $7 per share and falling short of its expected $8.50-$10.50 per share. The dotcom bubble was not yet in full swing and there was speculation even at the time that Maxtor could have timed its IPO better. But Maxtor ultimately sold out to Seagate for almost quadruple its IPO value 7 years later, which made it a better investment than most dotcom stocks were in the end.
But Maxtor’s performance was uneven over the years, which led to it being an acquisition target. The Maxtor acquisition contrasted with the Conner acquisition, where Conner negotiated from a position of relative strength. Maxtor was being squeezed between Seagate and Western Digital.
Were Maxtor drives good?
Maxtor drives don’t seem to have the best reputation. I’ve met more people who didn’t like them than liked them, and I just watched a Youtube video where Miketech refurbished an IBM Aptiva and wasn’t happy to find a Maxtor drive inside. The drive had bad sectors and made some unpleasant racket but it did boot and work.
Personally, I found Maxtor drives to be middling performers but reasonably reliable. But some generations were better than others so if you bought a subpar generation of Maxtor drive, I understand being sour on the brand. I’m sour on Western Digital for the same reason, having experienced two subpar generations of their drives in the 1990s. I didn’t like Seagate drives in the 486 era, but they’d gotten much better by the Pentium II era.
So I’m less sour on Maxtor than some people may be. I liked Quantum better, and I liked pre-75GXP IBM drives better too. These days, any 1990s drive is a bit suspect due to aging. Quantum drives were very reliable when they were new but the rubber stoppers in them are almost certainly degraded now, so even though the heads and platters in them are probably still fine, if the arm is glued in place and can’t move, the drive won’t work.
Maxtor wasn’t my favorite brand, but I won’t replace a Maxtor drive in a vintage machine just because it’s a Maxtor. I’ll spin it up first and see what it’s doing.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Stumbled across this looking for information about Central Hardware. A good couple hours spent reading your posts!
I used to buy Maxtor drives off some website (can’t remember) that sold cheap hardware around the turn of the century. Maybe price watch? Always wanted WesternDigital but being a broke college student Maxtor was the cheapest, and they always seemed to fail about 2 years in. Bought a handful of drives between 98-00 (4.3GB, 10GB, 20GB) and man I thought I was living high on the hog. That 4.3GB was puny, it was a WD drive though and still works today while the 10/20GB were Maxtor and went to the dustbin of history.
Thanks for the comment. Maxtor drives gave me more trouble than Quantum drives did but I always got at least 4 years out of them versus a year or two out of Western Digital drives. Maybe Maxtor drives just liked how I ran my computers better. It could also be the particular generations of drive I got, everyone had good and bad streaks in the 90s.
do you know of plus development hard cards ?
i want them to install for Tandy 1000 8 bit 10″ slots
I worked at a company in 1984 that was building caching disk subsystems for minicomputers, mostly DEC PDP-11s. The XT-1140 was an amazing thing at its time, with a whopping (if I remember correctly) 140 megabytes of storage. But onboard cache didn’t come along until a few year later, so they were pretty slow by today’s standards, given that you were facing an average seek/rotational delay for every read/write. They were also 5 1/4″ sized drives, easily weighing 5 to 10 lbs each. But still quite the marvel at the time, given the alternatives.
I had a few different Maxtor drives. I think I had one fail, but I had a 1.8GB model was still working by the time it was well obsolete. I’ve had a similar mix of good drives and duds across various generations of the other big brands. I still have a 1.2GB 5.25” Maxtor SCSI drive, I should see if it still works. Seems like most of the large drive companies made good and bad runs of drives but I’ve known plenty of guys that swore by/at one brand or another.