Maxtor

Maxtor was founded in San Jose in 1982 and started with large 5.25-inch drives for workstations and minicomputers, long before its name showed up on retail shelves. Through the 1990s margins collapsed across the hard drive business, and Maxtor survived by being the cheapest: its DiamondMax line sat inside a large share of the world's office PCs.

In 2001 it bought Quantum's hard drive business and became one of the industry's biggest players overnight. It wasn't enough. The industry consolidated down to a handful of companies, and in 2006 Seagate bought Maxtor for around $1.9 billion. The brand lingered for a while on external drives, which was mostly a way to sell the same disk twice.