History 2003: MKE to Produce HDDs for Toshiba

After serving as the sole manufacturer of Quantum’s HDDs, only to be more or less supplanted by Maxtor as the subcontractor of choice, Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics (MKE) needed to find another customer for its disk drive assembly plants.

The first replacement will be Toshiba, which is looking to expand production. MKE signed an agreement to manufacture Toshiba’s 1.8-inch HDDs in April and 2.5-inch units in the second half of the year in its plant in Batam, Indonesia. This facility, PT MKE Peripherals Indonesia, was established in May 1999.

The output will be sold under the Toshiba name.

One question remains, however: Will MKE, an expert at automated production based on highly evolved robotics, be capable of producing the small drives for Toshiba at equally small prices, when it was not able to achieve this for Maxtor with 3.5-inch units?

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 181 on February 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.