Quantum Corporation

Quantum Corporation is a manufacturer of tape drive, tape automation, and disk-based data deduplication backup, recovery and deduplication storage products for physical, virtual and cloud environments. It also sells scalable file storage systems and archive software and appliances for managing data. The company's headquarters is in San Jose, California. From its founding in 1980 until 2001, it was also a major disk storage manufacturer (usually second-place in market share behind Seagate), and was based in Milpitas, California. Quantum sold its hard disk drive business to Maxtor in 2001.

Hard disk products 1980–2001

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.

Early products

Early on, the company designed smaller ST-506-compatible versions of its hard drives, the Q500 series, using the same servo system. In 1985, it introduced the Plus Hardcard, which was essentially a smaller version of the Q500, designed to fit in an ISA slot. In 1986, Quantum entered the then-new SCSI market with the Q280 80MB drive, which was one of the first mass-market drives to use embedded servo. Later on, Quantum combined the Q280's embedded controller design with the servo hardware from the Q500 series, and developed the ProDrive range, which was also its first drive family to support the ATA interface.