Say hello to Maxell-branded hard drives Hitachi Maxell is turning itself into an external hard drive supplier with a GEN branded line of products. Maxell is best known for supplying batteries and storage media. It's now extending its brand to cover USB-connected hard drives for the SOHO and consumer markets. The loss-making Maxell company was a partially-owned …
but with their CD's. Worst ones I've used. The sheer amount of coasters that were burnt was ludicrous, I had better results with the 10 cent bulk CD's than maxell's(they were around $1 a disk at the time). Also had to chuck the rest of the Maxells that did burn right after 3 years seeing the data started getting corrupt and put them on new cd's.
Their videos were alright, and in the early days (welll.... I mean early 2000s anyway) their CDRs were about the most reliable I could find.
Unfortunately at some point some bean counter decided to go for a cheaper wholesale supplier and they all become crap :( ..... and giving them a second chance recently, their DVDRs turned out to be a pile of rubbish too. Some didn't even burn successfully and about 70% proved to have errors in post-burn tests that meant I either had to re-burn some files or bin the entire disk. I tried all speeds from 4 thru 16x after first noticing, too, and in a couple of usually reliable drives.
I can agree with the audio tapes too - I think a bright orange Maxell that a friend gave me in school is about the worst cassette in my collection, even when I tried to re-record the contents after liking the muffed versions enough to buy the CDs... and this collection includes copies of Monty Python LPs that my dad made on cheap-as-chips secondhand tapes in the late 70s.
Let's hope that the Hitachi side of the business shows through more in the disks than the Maxell one.
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