History (1998): IBM Opens HDD Disk Platter Plant in Ireland

In December 1996, IBM announced a $350 million investment in a 100-acre Technology Campus at Mulhuddart, County Dublin, Ireland.

IBM SSD was the first to announce its presence on the Campus to manufacture magnetic rigid magnetic disk platters for HDDs, and the plant was officially opened on October 23, 1998.

Initial investment is $250 million for a factory that will ultimately employ 700 people and produce 30 million disks per year.

For the moment, we’re not yet there. The plant is starting with only 200 employees.

Why Dublin? “A competitive business environment the availability of scientific engineering; operational and administrative disciplines,” according to IBM.

Add to that the fact the local authorities offer a great deal of advantages to foreign companies that invest in a country with the lowest salaries in Western Europe, although higher than in Hungary, where IBM has an HDD assembly line in Szekesfehervar.

Even so, disk manufacturing is more automated than HDD assembly, and thus requires less manual labor.

The aluminum substrates on which the Irish manufacturers work come from IBM’s Rochester, MN facility.

For the magnetization process, the two main investments, in terms of equipment were for the sputtering systems, purchased from Balzers and the testing battery for the end of the line.

Each platter, after all, is individually verified. It would be far too risky (and costly) to discover, once the HDD was assembled, that a platter was defective. The testers, entirely automated, were also manufactured by IBM.

Once the magnetic disks are finished, they are shipped elsewhere, to IBM’s plant in Guadalajara, Mexico, for instance, to be mounted into HDAs, which in turn are shipped to the drive assembly lines in Szekesfehervar and Singapore.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 131 on December 1998 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.