maximum Maytag mode

n.

What a washing machine or, by extension, any disk drive is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load. If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming walking drives. In 1999 it's been some years since hard disks were large enough to do this, but the same phenomenon has recently been reported with 24X CD-ROM drives.