A New Spin on Storage - What the merger means...
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So what happens to Maxtor? Well, the Maxtor line of products will become a value line while Seagate's products will remain cutting-edge. Marc Joulait, Seagate's vice president of segment marketing has said that "Seagate-branded hard drives will continue to deliver leading-edge technologies, top capacities and performance, rich feature sets and best-in-class channel service and support, while our Maxtor drives feature mainstream capacities, features, and performance to meet basic notebook and desktop needs." He went on to say, "We will use Maxtor to fight competitors in terms of price, rather than taking premium off the Seagate brand."
While all new Maxtor drives will be based on Seagate's core hard drive technology, there will be differences between the two lines. Seagate Barracuda drives currently top out at 750 GB, while Maxtor Diamond Max drives only reach 320 GB. Similar trends can be seen in the notebook lines. Aside from reviving Maxtor's Diamond Max line, Seagate also plans to introduce the new 5400 RPM MobileMax 2.5-inch line for notebooks that will feature capacities up to 80 GB, and all new Maxtor drives will feature a three-year warranty while Seagate-branded drives will continue to offer an industry leading five-year warranty.
A Seagate press release spoke about the future of support.
"Seagate will continue to provide distributors and resellers with tools, programs and incentives designed to create demand for and sell a broad range of computers built with Seagate brand hard drives. That best-in-class support includes pricing incentives, rebates, quarterly profit sharing, stock rotation, early pay discounts, price protection and a regulated hierarchy of authorized distributors.
"Seagate's support for Maxtor brand hard drives will include volume incentive programs and basic levels of service and support for resellers and system integrators. The Maxtor brand business model also will be based on open distribution with a standard pricing structure and volume discounts that will enable Maxtor authorized distributors to respond quickly to customer needs."
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