Today Seagate and Maxtor made the announcement regarding the future of the two brands. They hope that having a dual brand strategy will add benefits for all channels. For their customers, this means the choice between two different brands targeted towards different areas of the market. For the system builders there will be two value propositions depending on the system being built. For the distributors, there will only be one sales force that they need to deal with for the two brands. For Seagate the chance to expand their customer base and market share. Maxtor and Seagate were targeted towards different partners prior to the merger. There was a surprisingly small 11% overlap between the two, leaving 89% of Maxtor partners not already dealing with Seagate.
The Seagate brand will remain delivering leading technology,
broad and comprehensive product lines, rich product feature sets, and best in
class channel service and support.
The Maxtor brand will provide mainstream
capacities, features, and performance to support entry and basic notebook and
desktop needs.
Seagate commits to continued support for Maxtor products and
customers. All Maxtor warranties (3 year warranty) will be honored whether the
drive was purchased two years ago or last week.
Maxtor’s DiamondMax line is getting a refresher with its new
generation being released now. This drive will be targeting the 7200rpm entry
level, home and business PCs, and external storage. These new generation of
drives will be using Seagate?s perpendicular recording technology.
New to the Maxtor lineup will be the new MobileMax 5400rpm
notebook hard drives. These will be targeted towards entry and mainstream
applications.
Maxtor?s DiamondMax line will consist of drives ranging from
40GB to 320GB using both SATA 3G and PATA interfaces and having both 2MB and
8MB of cache depending on the model. Seagate?s Barracuda line will compliment the Maxtor?s with drives
ranging from 40GB to 750GB using both SATA 3G and PATA interfaces and having 2,
8, and 16MB cache depending on the model. As larger capacity drives become more mainstream and lower in price, the
DiamondMax line will begin to carry the 400GB and possibly the 500GB models.
On the mobile front, the MobileMax line will consist of 40
to 80GB drives using the PATA interface and 2MB of cache spinning at
5400rpm. The Momentus line will consist of
drives ranging from 40GB up to 160GB using both the PATA and SATA 1.5G interfaces
with 2MB and 8MB cache respectively with spindle speeds of 5400rpm and 7200rpm
on certain models.
With both brands of drives coming off the same assembly lines, differentiation between the two will come down to product SKUs,
configurations, feature sets, and support. Maxtor drives will carry their
existing 3 year warranty while Seagate drives will continue to carry their best
in class 5 year warranty. The drives themselves may use the same core
technology but will be differentiated by cache, spindle speed, interface,
features, and as mentioned warranty.
It is going to be interesting to see what the other
manufacturers will do to combat the powerhouse that Seagate and Maxtor have
formed.