Seagate closing Singapore plant

Seagate is closing a hard disk drive facility in Singapore, making up to 2,000 redundancies as it strives to reduce costs. The one-million-square-foot site at Ang Mo Kio became operational in 1997. Seagate says it makes all of the company's mission-critical hard drives - understood to mean enterprise drives. There are about 4, …

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Posted Tuesday 4th August 2009 19:11 GMT

Anonymous Coward

expensive self-bricking door stoppers #

two days ago i just had another friend come to me and complain about a non-booting pc...

i examined it and find it's another of the suicidal batch of drives with the SD15 firmware.... that makes about 12...15 of these drives that i personally found in the last year that decided to spontaneously transform into very expensive bricks... fortunately he had saved most of his data the previous week and sent the drive back for replacement in warranty

since they started dropping like flies i've been avoiding seagate drives and i won't touch them for another year or so.

/grenade icon for the random-trigger bomb that seagate embedded in these sd15 drives.

Posted Tuesday 4th August 2009 23:00 GMT

Chris C

Mission-critical #

So, in the midst of, of shortly after, a reportedly massive failure rate of Seagate's hard drives (specifically, drives made in China, not drives made in Singapore), Seagate decides to close down their Singapore plant, the plant which they claim makes all of their "mission-critical" drives. Maybe I'm just a naive ignoramus, but if I was running a company, I would want to keep open the plant which makes the best drives, and does so with a low failure rate, and close the plant(s) with high failure rates. But then, I'm just a lowly tech with no company to call my own.

Posted Wednesday 5th August 2009 09:19 GMT

Anonymous Coward

@Chris C #

The drives are made in Thailand, not in China. And it's a firmware bug, not a manufacturing defect.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/16/barracuda_failure_plague/

It's probably cheaper to move the production line elsewhere and replace the occasional failed drives than to continue making them in Singapore, anyway.

Posted Wednesday 5th August 2009 09:19 GMT

Michael Langner

@ Chris C #

Well, but you do need to remember that a Singapore staff will cost about 5-8x the amount of a mainland china staff...

Posted Wednesday 5th August 2009 09:19 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Why Singapore #

It was the Chinese drives that failed, not the ones from Singapore!

Posted Wednesday 5th August 2009 09:24 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Classic Management #

This smells like the same ancient management thinking that still prevails. Instead of making reliable drives in the first place, lets cut personnel so we can show a cost reduction for the next quarter while we arrange our exit packages and move on to another company. This will make all future decisions progressively easier as we will end up with a single source for hard drives and processors.

Posted Wednesday 5th August 2009 12:19 GMT

Kevin Bailey

Much of this could have been avoided... #

...if they'd released a couple of lines of bash to help the linux admins with the barracuda issue.

Posted Wednesday 5th August 2009 15:21 GMT

TeeCee

Funny that. #

How 2000 staff get "sacked" for doing their jobs, yet the CEO responsible for the monumental strategic fuckup that led to it gets, er, "replaced" in a round of musical chairs at board level.

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