Milestones Icon: Seagate Technologies

From its location at 389 Disc Drive in Longmont, Seagate Technology LLC is one of the most enduring companies in the region working in the computer hard drive industry.

Seagate’s hard drives are found in consumer electronics items across the globe – from mobile computers and video game systems to cell phones.

Longmont’s design center facility serves as the base for the company’s computer hard drive product development. Seagate’s corporate headquarters is in Scotts Valley, California, and the drives are manufactured overseas.

As part of a larger Boulder Valley computer industry marked by buyouts, mergers and acquisitions, Seagate’s roots in Colorado actually go back to 1985.

That’s the year Seagate co-founder Finis Conner formed Conner Peripherals Inc. in Longmont to work on a particular kind of computer disk drive. Seagate merged with Conner Peripherals Inc. in October 1995.

Other products designed in Longmont include a wide variety of storage devices, some of which came from the former Conner days, as well as from Maxtor Corp. and MiniScribe Inc.

Data-storage firm MiniScribe was founded in 1980 in Longmont. When the company went bankrupt in 1990, its assets were bought for about $46 million by San Jose, California-based Maxtor Corp.

Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006 for about $1.9 billion, and many of the Maxtor products are still sold by the company.

Seagate built its own campus in Longmont in 1999, an estimated $70 million project of about 450,000 square feet on a 60-acre parcel at the northeast corner of Nelson Road and 75th Street.

The campus was expanded in 2007 by 80,000 square feet to accommodate Maxtor’s workers. It is now 530,000 square feet and houses more than 1,100 employees.

The company (Nasdaq: STX) went private in 2000, only to turn around and go public again in 2002.

One thing has remained constant – computer disk drives have gotten smaller as their storage capacities have gotten way bigger. As one of the more significant milestones in a series of industry milestones throughout the years, the company shipped its 1 billionth hard drive in 2008.

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