Hard disk drive maker Seagate is to invest £120m in extending its Londonderry factory to produce greater volumes of read-write heads for its products.

Despite a growing preference for using solid state rather than spinning disk hard drives in notebook PCs and servers, Seagate is confident that it will ship a billion hard drives within the next five years and needs to scale up production to meet anticipated demand.

The Londonderry manufacturing plant was opened in 1994 and employs about 1,300 people recruited from Northern Ireland and other European countries.