80% Of Maxtor HDDs Produced in Singapore

Maxtor Singapore Ltd. (Singapore), a major manufacturing arm of US Maxtor Corp., produces 5.25-inch HDDs with unformatted capacities ranging from 85MB to 760MBs, and optical disk drives with a 800MB capacity.

It was established in 1983 with one plant and about 50 employees. Since then, it has grown to an integrated operation with a combined 32,500 square-meter area and a total workforce over 1,800.

The Singapore operation does about 80% of all manufacturing for the parent company. The main company, 18,500 square meters, with administration offices, undertakes final assembly and testing of disk drives. The three other facilities manufacture components exclusively for Maxtor.

In April 1988, the firm set up a 100- employee, 2,320 square-meter plant in Penang, Malaysia. It produces subassemblies, used in the final assembly at the Singapore plant. Maxtor will move more of its labor-intensive subassembly work to the Malaysian plant, that will expand as production grows. Most of the production is hand made and automating process advances selectively. In the Singapore plant, Maxtor manufactures drives for three interface types: ST41 21506, ESDI and SCSI, but do not do anything with controllers.

The smallest capacity disk drive made is the XT-1085. It has a formatted capacity of 69MB and an unformatted capacity of 85MB. The largest is the XT- 8760 with formatted and unformatted capacities of 676 and 768MB, respectively.

The subsidiary just established an R&D organization in Singapore, not to develop new drives but to concentrate on components for disk drives, specially those to do with spindle motors, actuators, heads or disk media.

Most materials are obtained locally, with some coming from Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. All disks and most of the heads are bought in USA.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠16, published on May 1989.