hard drive history

1993 Drive of the Year

Photo: Red Hill.

Maxtor 7213A

The excellent 7213A was our mainstay for a long, long time and almost the last of the great Maxtor drives.

These were the days when Windows 3.1 was new and DOS still reigned supreme, when a large space-hogging application came on as many as four floppy discs (yes 4!) and everyone had twin floppy drives. These were the days of the flip-top case and the 386DX-40 with 4MB of RAM in 30-pin SIMMs, the days of of PC Tools and XTree Gold, of the Trident TVGA-9000 512k ISA video card, and for us — inevitably — a Maxtor 7213.

There were other 210MB drives; the Western Digital in particular was a worthy rival; the Seagate, the Quantum, and the Conner were all good performers — but in our view the Maxtor 7213 was the best of all. It was a long-lived model and we sold hundreds upon hundreds of units.

Only a year or two later Maxtor — even then regarded as the grand old survivor of the hard drive industry — would begin to feel the pinch. Stuck in a relentless price war, the company would spiral down through a series of ever less-attractive products towards eventual bankruptcy in mid-decade. But in '92 and '93, Maxtor was right up there with the best of them.

The 7213s lasted well too. Up until about 1997, when Windows 95 became common and a 212MB drive could no longer cut the mustard, the 7213 was still a common sight in older systems. Though we hardly ever sold new Maxtors in the years since that time, the 7213 remains one of our all-time favourite drives, and it gave us very faithful service.