Seagate Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland site of the US data storage company Seagate, in Springtown, Derry/Londonderry, which makes the recording heads used inside hard drives.

About Seagate Northern Ireland

Seagate Technology is one of the world's best known makers of data storage. Its products are the hard drives that hold huge amounts of digital information, from personal devices to the data centres behind cloud services. The Derry/Londonderry site does a very particular job: it designs and manufactures recording heads, the tiny components that write data to and read it from the spinning discs inside a hard drive. The site's own page says it is the largest of its type in the industry and supplies over a million heads every day for Seagate drives.

Seagate says its products help people "store, share and protect their valuable digital content". The operation in Springtown was set up in 1993, and Seagate describes it as Derry/Londonderry's largest manufacturer. The work involves making heads on silicon wafers in a clean manufacturing environment, using techniques such as photolithography (printing very fine patterns with light), vacuum deposition and etching, electroplating and precise measurement called metrology. In 2019 Seagate announced further investment in the site focused on research and development in nanophotonics, which is the use of light at very small scales.

The site is on the Springtown Industrial Estate in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Seagate's page says more than 1,400 people work there across research and development, manufacturing and other functions, and a 2022 news report put the workforce at 1,557 after the company took on 101 extra people in 2021. The site also leads a research partnership called Smart Nano NI, which a 2021 report said was backed by a UK Research and Innovation grant and included other organisations working on advanced manufacturing.

Seagate's page describes on-site facilities including a canteen and gym, together with employee groups such as a Young Professionals Network, a Women's Leadership Group and a creative network. It also mentions community volunteering. These are the company's own descriptions, and the page does not name individual employees, so we have no personal accounts of the day-to-day. Training it mentions covers data analysis, Six Sigma, lean manufacturing and recording head technology.

The engineering disciplines on the site are research and development, process engineering, equipment engineering and manufacturing engineering, backed by technicians, quality and support teams. If you are studying physics, materials, electrical or mechanical engineering, chemistry or data analysis, this is a place where those subjects are used on a factory floor producing something very small and very precise. Seagate has many more staff globally, but a Northern Ireland view of the company is the part relevant to students in the UK.

What they do

• {'desc': 'Wafer-based manufacture of the heads that read and write data on hard drives.', 'title': 'Recording head manufacturing'}
• {'desc': 'Work on new head technology, including nanophotonics.', 'title': 'Research and development'}
• {'desc': 'Process, equipment and manufacturing engineering on the factory floor.', 'title': 'Engineering and technician roles'}

Key facts

• Springtown operation set up in Derry in 1993
• More than 1,400 employees on the site (Seagate page); 1,557 in a 2022 news report
• Supplies over a million recording heads a day (own claim)
• Led the Smart Nano NI research consortium, backed by a UKRI grant (2021 report)

Website: www.seagate.com