Seagate Plans £300m Thailand Expansion

Storage titan Seagate Technology has announced it will be investing more than £300 million into Thailand over the next five years.

The hard drive maker plans to build a new facility by 2016 at its Korat plant north of Bangkok.

Strategic location

Seagate SVP Jeffrey Nygaard told a news conference: “For more than 30 years, Seagate has invested in Thailand as a strategic location for our global operations and the new building at our facility at Korat will enable Seagate to address the continued strong demand for storage.”

The Korat plant is currently home to Seagate’s biggest hard drive manufacturing campuses, with Nygaard claiming that Asia contributes to 40 percent of Seagate’s total revenue.

This year, Seagate hopes to launch hard drives that feature Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). With HAMR, the recording head includes a tiny laser that heats up the medium before information is written, to allow the use of smaller magnetic grains and narrower data tracks. The technology was successfully demonstrated in 2012 and could take information density to unbelievable 5TB/in², but there are still plenty of kinks left to iron out.

Are you a storage device expert? Take our quiz here!