Quantum Corporation

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Image:Quantum logo.gifQuantum Corporation Template:Nyse is a manufacturer of tape drive products, based in San Jose, California. From their founding in 1980 until 2000, they were also a major disk storage manufacturer (usually #2 in market share behind Seagate), and were based in Milpitas, California.

Quantum got its start when executives and designers from Shugart Associates, IBM and Memorex came up with an idea for an 8-inch hard drive that would achieve decent performance without the cost or complexity of using a full closed-loop servo system — a difficult task before the advent of dedicated servo ICs and readily-available DSPs). At the time, low end drives generally used stepper motors, just like floppy disk drives did. Steppers worked, but were slow, noisy, and prone to reliability problems due to changes in temperature. The idea the founders had was to combine the predefined steps of a stepper motor, and the accuracy of a closed-loop servo; they put a diffraction grating on the head arm, used a voice coil motor to move the arm, and only used closed-loop functionality once a seek finished, relying on the slits in the grating to count tracks during a "gross motor" movement. This saved quite a bit of hardware, and allowed the entire servo system to be controlled with only a single 8-bit microcontroller. The 40 MB Q2000 and 80 MB Q4000 were the first drives to use this technology.

Quantum's first products were very popular; according to one of their historical documents, by 1982 they had a 25% share of the market. They designed smaller ST-506-compatible versions of their hard drives, the Q500 series, using the same servo system. They also introduced (through their Plus Development division) what would be most people's introduction to the company, the Plus HardCard, in 1985. The HardCard was essentially a version of the Q500, redesigned and reformatted to fit in an ISA slot, with an embedded controller card bolted to the same frame as the drive. The product sold very well, and was updated to higher capacities every so often. It also inspired a slew of imitators.

Because of the demand for their drives, Quantum decided early on to outsource their manufacturing, as opposed to most of their competitors, who decided to stay completely vertically integrated and had opened plants of their own in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. In 1984, they signed an agreement with Matsushita to produce their mass-market drives and the HardCard in their Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics (MKE) factory in Ipponmatsu, Japan. By the late 1990s, all of Quantum's disk products would be produced in Matsushita factories.Template:Fn

Not long after this, Quantum decided it would enter the then brand-new SCSI market. The first drive they designed especially for SCSI was the Q280 80MB drive, which was released in 1986 and had an average seek time of 30 milliseconds — quite good for the era. The Q280 was also one of the first mass-market drives (along with Conner Peripherals' products) to use embedded servo. Later on, they combined the Q280's embedded controller design with the servo hardware from the Q500 series, and developed the ProDrive range, which were also their first drives to support the ATA interface. The two design platforms (optical assist and full embedded servo) co-existed until the early 1990s, when the optical system was deemed too slow to be competitive and was discontinued.

In 1994 Quantum purchased DEC's data storage division. This gave them access to the DLT streaming tape system, as well as Digital's Storageworks high-end SCSI drive expertise in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Due to widespread Y2K fears, the DLT briefly sold so well that Quantum eventually split the company into two parts, one for the DLT and its associated products, and one for hard disk drives.

Quantum made a few missteps during the late 1990s. After hitting their peak with the Fireball 1080 and Fireball 1280 (both high-performance 5400 rpm models), they skewed briefly toward "value" drives that concentrated more on capacity than speed or performance. The Bigfoot drive was the best-known product of this era; it used a 5.25-inch form factor and larger disks to increase drive capacity without forcing an increase in areal density. However, the Bigfoot drives had slow spindles (the first ones ran at only 3600 rpm, long obsolete by then), and the larger disk diameters meant the heads had to move farther when seeking. They were thus generally disliked by "power users", and found their way mostly into inexpensive brand-name PCs. Quantum also applied the "Fireball" name (which had previously been reserved for the high-end 1080 and 1280 models) to a new "TM" model that featured better throughput, but slower seek times due to a 4500 rpm spindle. Later versions of the Fireball series reversed this trend, and eventually a 7200 rpm Fireball Plus ATA version was released, being one of the first mainstream consumer-oriented 7200 rpm drives. The first of the Plus series was the Fireball Plus KA, a drive available in sizes up to 18.2 gigabytes, and equipped with the new Ultra DMA 66 interface. Quantum also developed a range of decent server-SCSI drives based on DEC designs during this time, eventually releasing 10,000 rpm and 15,000 rpm versions of their Atlas flagship series.Template:Fn Template:Fn

By 2000, the hard drive market was getting squeezed. Personal computer sales were dropping, value drives had razor-thin margins and were only getting thinner, and several makers (notably Western Digital) were in trouble. Quantum decided to sell their hard drive division during this time; the division was acquired by Maxtor (which had been in trouble, but was revitalized by the success of the DiamondMax line and an investment by Hyundai). Maxtor continued most of Quantum's disk storage products and brands until it was announced in December 2005 that Seagate was buying Maxtor. Quantum kept the DLT tape drive range, as well as network attached storage maker Snap Appliances, which it has since spun off.

In 2000, Quantum acquired ATL, a manufacturer of tape libraries.

In 2002, Quantum acquired Benchmark Storage Innovations, who manufactured the VStape product line under a Quantum license.

In 2005, Quantum acquired Certance, the former tape business of Seagate Technology, becoming a member of the LTO consortium.

Notes

Template:Fnb In the early 1990s Quantum had built a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility for its high-end drives in Milpitas, but due to mismanagement was eventually forced to shut it down and turn manufacturing over to MKE. The high-end products then got the MKE mass market treatment, and product quality and reliability suffered.

Template:Fnb Like many American east-west corporate marriages, the acquisition of DEC's disk drive operation was fraught with cultural problems. The high-end development engineering teams in Milpitas were relegated to designing second-tier drives, while the Shrewsbury teams were to handle the maximum-performance product. Nonetheless, the Milpitas designs (Viking, Phoenix and Katana) consistently exceeded Shrewsbury's performance at lower cost, leading to political maneuvering and the eventual demise of high-end drive design in Milpitas in mid-2000.

Template:Fnb DEC's SCSI expertise was developed in designing tape drives. The SCSI hard disk drives came later and re-used firmware from the tape drives. Rather than writing firmware optimized for disk drives, they added an abstraction layer of code on top of the tape drive code to implement disk drive functions. This led to poor performance, even with fast head actuators and high spindle speeds. The Milpitas team used "clean sheet" firmware designs in the Viking, Phoenix and Katana drives. They were eventually defeated when they were forced by management edict to adopt Shrewsbury's code base and choice of microcontroller in the Orca drive, their final project.