History (1995): Hewlett-Packard OEMs HDDs … From Maxtor!

From the “we haven’t seen this in a while” files: a hard disk drive manufacturer is offering a competitor’s units in its catalog.

Hewlett-Packard has announced two AT 3.5-inch drives, SureStore models 1080A and 1600A, which are, respectively, none other than reference models 710S4AP and 71626AP from Maxtor’s 7000 series Durango family.

The drives were launched by Maxtor in mid-’95 at $350 and $500 for single unit OEM evaluation quantities. Now HP lists them for the general public at $500 and $800.

Hewlett-Packard’s press release is none too specific about the origin of the drives, but there can be no doubt. An internal source at HP confirmed the fact, which is further borne out by a comparison of the technical characteristics of the 2 product lines.

The recent signing of this major client can only mean a breath of fresh air in the midst of Maxtor’s current financial troubles.

HP, for its part, explains that this line of drives is not particularly profitable, that one company cannot manufacturer everything and that it is preferable to look elsewhere for products others make better, drawing out the comparison with the laser printer division, which has been extraordinarily successful with units built on Canon’s insides.

The upshot of this OEM agreement, nevertheless, is that HP has decided to focus primarily on high performance and high capacity HDDs, and back off from 3.5-inch high-volume desktop drives.

More importantly, according to a Maxtor representative, HP will not sell its units to OEMs, concentrating instead on distribution and retail channels exclusively.

The 2 new drives are packaged in a special box with all the information needed to integrate them into a PC. These solutions, sold in superstores, have been more successful in USA than in Europe, where interest in this practice nonetheless appears to be picking up.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 94, published on November 1995.