The closure of Rodime Plc’s plant in Scotland seemed to mark the end of locally-owned indigenous disk drive manufacture in the UK but you can’t keep a good engineer down, and Norman White, former technical director of Rodime rallied some of his chums from that company a year ago and has formed Calluna Technology Ltd in Glenrothes to design and make high-capacity 1.8 internal and external disk drives for sub-notebook computers. The company has developed a credit-card size drive that stores a total of 80Mb on two platters in a package just 0.41 thick. It plans to start manufacture in March and has capacity for 50,000 units a year. Employing 17 now, it expects to create 100 jobs over the next year. It is backed by 3i Plc, Altus Finance SA, Innolian SA and Scottish Enterprise, but the level of the financing has not been disclosed.
