Motors & Drives Information

Although commonly called Silicon Valley, California's Santa Clara Valley is home to another electronics industry that compares in size with the area's semiconductor industry. That other industry is the disk drive business.

Disk Drive Valley is the original home of hundreds of companies involved in the disk drive market, including not only billion-dollar drive manufacturers, but also the underlying and often overlooked infrastructure of vendor companies.

Like the semiconductor industry, the disk drive business has grown outward from the valley to expand throughout the U.S., Europe, Japan and Southeast Asia.

Twelve years ago, U.S.-based companies established manufacturing facilities in Singapore. Since then, the drive industry has since grown into the largest business sector in Singapore's GNP. To support the manufacturing base in Singapore, supplier companies have sprung up there and in other Southeast Asian countries.

As in the semiconductor business, Japan has become another center for technological development in disk drives.

The disk drive business is now learning one of the major lessons previously learned by sister businesses, such as the semiconductor industry: the health of system manufacturers is dependent upon a healthy supplier infrastructure.

In the drive industry, that food chain starts among the suppliers from whom larger drive makers buy the components, capital equipment and services that are used in producing a finished disk drive.

Building a disk drive requires much more than heads and disks. Capital equipment such as sputtering systems and test systes, components including motors and semiconductor chips, and packaging and assembly services all contribute to the final product. Yet very few drive makers have all of these capabilities in house. Instead, they purchase them from outside vendors.

As products reach mass markets, volume becomes the name of the game and unit profit margins get smaller.

Disk drive makers rely on their suppliers for many of the revolutionary technological advances that allow them to achieve higher storage densities in smaller sizes.

To serve their customers, vendors must provide larger volumes of components while driving down costs and, at the same time, must improve performance and reliability specifications. These market conditions demand that the vendors make huge capital investments--as much as 50 cents of each revenue dollar--to maintain the technological pace.

# posted by Medical Information : 2:32 AM