Maxtor Corp, San Jose, California has launched a high volume line of disk drives for desktop computers and a super-robust disk drive for notebooks, in the latest move away from its position as pioneer of super-high-capacity mainstream drives. Maxtor has been repositioning itself ever since the early 1990s when fluctuations in demand for its products lead to spectacular financial losses. It was saved from oblivion by a major cash input from Hyundai Electronics Industries Co Ltd, which bought a 40% stake in the company last year, as well as staff cuts and the change in strategy. So far, it all seems to be working: results for the year to March 26 showed a net loss down from $19.7m in 1993 to $4.5m, even though turnover fell 24.6% to $260.4m (CI No 2,417). Maxtor believes that it can boost turnover by carving itself a niche in the portable computer storage market and the launch of the MobileMax 171, a 171Mb 1.8 PCMCIA Type III hard disk drive is just part of that. The company says that at the moment it has 40% of a small worldwide market, but now that the problems with PCMICA standards have been resolved, Maxtor expects the need for PCMCI-type products will mushroom. This year the market is expected to be around 150,000 units.
Revival of fortunes
But Maxtor believes that PCMCIA-type disk rives will have applications beyond portables: games, pay phones, military navigation systems, health records and so on. It is in this diverse field that Maxtor hopes to revive its fortunes and plans to be dominant in PCMCIA disk dirves by next year. The 171 MobileMax is, claims the company, the most robust portable disk drive around. It is able to withstand a non-operating shock of 1,000 Gs, the equivalent of the disk falling from a desk onto a concrete floor. This ruggedness has been achieved through modifications in the head-disk assembly. The MobileMax has been built using 57% fewer components that its predecessors. The architecture is the product of a collaboration between Maxtor and Texas Instruments Inc’s DSP Product Group in Houston, Texas. It was Texas’s customisable signal processor chip that enabled the reduction in the overall number of parts. Voltage requirement has been reduced to 3V so increasing battery life. The data transfer rate is down from 25.5Mbps to 13.3Mbps, as is the average seek time, 16mS down from 19mS. The cache has been reduced in size to 32Kb. The MobileMax 171 is in volume production in the company’s manufacturing facility in Singapore. Single unit OEM evaluation quantities are priced at $400. And coinciding with the launch of the portable disk drive is Maxtor’s cheap and cheerful range of 1 high, 3.5 disk drives for desk top computers, the 7000 Series AV. Maxtor says the personal computer price war could lead to allocation on specific hard disk drives in the next quarter and it says these new drives will be ready to meet OEM requirements of high Megabyte-per-dollar drives. The drives build on Maxtor’s original 7000 Series of 3.5 disk drives. The A designates the drives as AT/IDE-compatible and the V is for Value for money. Maxtor has achieved the favourable Megabyte-dollar ratio by squeezing its suppliers to reduce their costs and by modifications in architecture. The 7000 Series AV is shipping to OEM customers such as Hewlett-Packard Co and is expected to be a high volume product for Maxtor. The drives are aimed at the low range to low-end of the mid range market and are compatible with most major operating systems. Initial offerings in the range include the 540Mb 7540AV, 420Mb 7420AV, 270Mb 7270AV, and 135Mb 7135AV. The disk drives have been priced similarly to products with lower capacity. It says that 540Mb will become the sweet spot of the desktop market overtaking 340Mb and 420Mb products as the desktop capacity of choice among OEM customers, value-added resellers, systems integrators, retailers and end-users. It says that anything under 420Mb will be obsolete by the first quarter of 1995. By next year 1Gb drives will be available. Specifications for the products are an average seek time of 14
mS; rotational speed of 3551 rpm; and a buffer size of 32Kb. The 7000 Series is currently shipping in volume to personal computer manufacturers. OEM pricing for the new drives is $265 for the 7540AV, $225 for the 7420AV, $175 for the 7270AV and $150 for the 7135AV. And Maxtor says that there will be more value lines announced next month.
