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Kalok Corporation

Company type	Private
Defunct	1994
Key people	Steven L. Kaczeus - Founder David B. Pearce
Products	Hard Drives

The Kalok Corporation was an American hard disk drive manufacturer company that was headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It designed and manufactured low-cost 3.5-in hard disk drives for desktop computers before going bankrupt in 1994.

Kalok's products were not very well known for their reliability or speed, and still used stepper motor head actuator technology in 1991, which was considered outdated as the hard drive industry moved to voice coil head actuators.

History

Kalok Corporation was founded in Sunnyvale, California, in 1987 by Steven Kaczeus and Wayne Lockhart. The company's founders had extensive prior experience in the field of computer data storage, which helped them attract investment. Kaczeus, the executive vice president of engineering and chief designer of the company's drives, had a history of designing successful products for prominent manufacturers such as LaPine Technology, Memorex, Seagate, and StorageTek. Lockhart, meanwhile, brought over 20 years of management experience from various Silicon Valley companies, including Varian Associates, Spectra-Physics, and Cooper LaserSonics. The company's name is derived from the beginning syllables of the founders' last names (Ka from Kaczeus and Lok from Lockhart). Manufacturing of Kalok's drives was originally performed by the Oriental Precision Company of Seoul, South Korea, who had a minority interest in Kalok as well as a licensing agreement allowing Oriental Precision to resell Kalok's drives under their own name.

In August 1988, Kalok announced the KL341 and KL343, both 40-MB hard disk drives, along with the KL332, a 30-MB HDD. All three were 3.5-inch-diameter HDDs, cost under $330 each, and were for intended for the value-added reseller and OEM markets. Although the KL341 and KL343 eschewed a number of parts used in HDDs its contemporary in order to cut costs, its MTBF was rated at 43,000 hours, more than double that of similar 3.5-inch HDDs by Seagate Technology, then the industry leader for such drives. The company announced 100-, 170-, and 330-MB drives for workstations that they hoped would be released in the fourth quarter of 1989.

Monthly output at Oriental Precision peaked at 10,000 units per month before Kalok decided to sever their relationship and raise their own factory in the Philippines in late 1989. The company were helped along with a business relationship with the Ayala Corporation, a large conglomerate in the Philippines. Kalok's move to the Philippines occurred simultaneously with a unsuccessful coup d'état against the government of Philippine President Corazon Aquino in December 1989. The attempted coup forced Kalok's factory to shut down temporarily; although Lockhart was trapped a hotel in Manila during this time, he remarked at the time that this event was less disruptive than a four-week factory stoppage at Oriental Precision.

By October 1990, Kalok secured US$15 million in equity financing from investors led by the giant Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi, which itself acquired a 19-percent ownership stake in Kalok and provided an additional US$8 million line of credit. Other participating investors included Orix Group, a leading leasing firm in Japan, as well as two Japanese venture capital firms: Techno-Venture Co. and Tokyo Venture Capital. Sunwestern Investment Group of Dallas, Texas, was erstwhile the sole U.S.-based investor in Kalok.

On June 6, 1992, Steven L. Kaczeus took over as President of Kalok.

On December 17, 1992, David B. Pearce took over as the new secretary of Kalok.

In 1990, Kalok reached almost $80 million in sales.

In 1994 Kalok went bankrupt and David B. Pearce moved on to found JT Storage Inc, another hard disk drive manufacturer with Sirjang Lal Tandon and Tom Mitchel. JT Storage would continue engineering and development programs from the defunct Kalok Corporation.

Hard Drive Models

KL-230

Services

One of their last offerings was a 100 megabyte 3.5-inch disk drive using a stepper motor head actuator (rather than the servo-based voice coil operated actuators used on most drives of that density) and was very limited in both access speed and reliability. The drive was manufactured in India, and was commonly found in very inexpensive generic PCs.

In the early 1990s, Kalok also designed hard disks for TEAC who used them as part of a removable hard disk drive system, which was also sold under the Kalok name. After Kalok failed in 1994, JT Storage (JTS) hired its founder as their chief technical officer, and licensed the patents involved from TEAC and Pont Peripherals.

References

1. ^ Clark, Don (October 10, 1990). "Low-Cost Strategy Lifts High-Tech Firm". San Francisco Chronicle. p. C1 – via ProQuest.
2. ^ Kovsky, Steven (July 25, 1988). "A disk-drive David takes aim at Goliaths". Computer Systems News. No. 376. UBM LLC. p. 16 – via Gale.
3. ^ Seither, Mike (October 1988). "New set of Winchester vendors battle entrenched players". Mini-Micro Systems. Vol. 21, no. 10. Reed Business Information. p. 17 et seq. – via Gale.
4. ^ Staff writer (August 8, 1988). "Kalok Offering 3.5-Inch Winchesters". Electronic News. Reed Business Information. p. 13.
5. ^ Hubbard, Holly (December 18, 1989). "Kalok stays on course". Computer Reseller News (346). UBM LLC: 37 – via Gale.
6. US patent 5446609, "Low profile disk drive assembly", issued 1995-08-29, assigned to TEAC Corporation and Pont Peripherals Corporation 
7. US patent 5886850, "High capacity, low profile disk drive system", issued 1999-03-23, assigned to TEAC Corporation and DZU Corporation 
8. "SD3250N, SD3360N, SD3540N (Removable Hard Disk Drives) - Installation guides and CMOS setup parameters" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-11-11.
9. "Form S-4: Registration under the Securities Act of 1933: JTS Corporation". 1996-06-22. Retrieved 2008-01-25.

External links

• "Kalok". Hardware Collection (in Chinese and English). Archived from the original on 2017-03-28. Retrieved 2017-03-28. (NB. An (incomplete) list of hard disk drives produced by Kalok.)

Category:Defunct computer hardware companies Category:Computer storage companies Category:Companies disestablished in 1994

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