Maxtor being cut in half

[Rob Williams]

According to the brief during Seagate's recent shareholder's meeting, much was discussed about. Seagate said that it plans to lay off more than 50% of existing Maxtor employees. While the company intends to keep the Maxtor brand name as well as some Maxtor services, it indicated that most of Maxtor's North American employees would be let go.

Seagate said that in terms of hardware, it plans to keep Maxtor's production of 3.5-inch, 10,000 RPM Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives and 500GB SATA hard drives -- the rest will be let go along with Maxtor's employees. Seagate also indicated that it will still support Maxtor's existing channel partners but did not indicate how long that would last.

Well that didn't take very long. It looks like China will not be affected at all, but they are laying off over 10,000 employees in the US.

I personally won't miss Maxtor in the US as I've had incredibly bad luck with them in the past, but that is a LOT of jobs down the drain.

 

[madmat]

I've never had any bad luck with a Maxtor drive myself but I've only had two of them so I don't have extensive experience with the brand. Sad to see Seagate do this though.

 

[Drew]

This seems to be a bad trend

This is a trend facing alot of companies in north america, selling off tens of thousands of jobs to cheap foreign labor that abuse and exploit their workforce. Don't companies have any sense of the message they are sending? We don't mind abusing several thousand people (both here and abroad) to make a buck. I know this is not a social commentary thread but i feel that has a bit of a place when it comes to making money off people who want better for themselves and their families and then dumping them for people who aren't allowed to question what is in it for them?

 

[liqnit]

i like maxtor but i think everyone should decide if he wants to support local people or not ofcours if the product is the same

 

[Jakal]

I had to rma the only Maxtor hd I've ever bought. It was built right after some product changes, so who knows. It may have been an overlooked lemon. 60Gb ATA-133. WD has my love..

 

[dloneranger]

So far I've had to destroy about 25% of the maxtor drives we bought (company policy), about 30 so far and counting...
All maxtor 300Gb drives both sata and pata
Usually they fail after 2 months

I'm not going to buy anything else from them for the forseable future - we've wasted too much money on them

IBM had the same problem with it's deskstar drives - there was a contamination in the IC's they bought in that cost them a fortune and eventually led them to sell their hard drive business to Hitachi
[edit] Makes you wonder why maxtor was bought by seagate for a song.......

If your're really adventurous, you can swap the main board from a dead drive to one from a working drive and %90 of the time the old drive will work, but I wouldn't recommend this because if you do it wrong you end up with 2 dead drives instead of one