Seagate Revives Maxtor Brand for Budget External Storage

For those of you that have been around for a while, one of the now defunct brands you might remember is Maxtor. During the late 90s and early 2000’s, the company was a major player in the hard disk business, and at one point, the largest manufacturer and market leader.  After a  series of missteps, the company ran into trouble and ended up being acquired by Seagate which terminated the brand. In a surprising twist, Seagate has decided to revive the Maxtor brand for a new external HDD lineup.

According to Seagate, the move is aimed at rebranding their budget external HDD lineup. After purchasing the Samsung HDD business a few years ago, Seagate kept using the Samsung brand for hard drives. The initial purchase agreement allowed the use of the Samsung trademark for a year but that had been extended. With the new Maxtor branding, it looks like Seagate doesn’t want to pay for a trademark anymore and develop their own brand image.

Going forwards, this means we will have 3 different brands for external Seagate drives. In the budget sphere, we will, of course, have Maxtor. Sitting in the middle will be Seagate itself and for the premium market, LaCie. Given the close performance between HDDs these days, the main differentiators will likely be enclosure design, capacity and minor details. One feature Maxtor is unlikely to get is network or NAD capabilities.

So far, we have the M3 mobile and D3 models using the Maxtor brand. The M3 starts out from 500GB and tops out at 4TB while the D3 starts at 1TB and goes up to 5TB. Both drives feature form factor specific features and utilize USB 3.0 connections. For now, the warranties are the same as Seagate’s own external drives. While the site is pretty barebones, I expect it to grow as more products get released under Maxtor.