LONGMONT - Seagate Technology Plc is remodeling 15,000 square feet at its plant in Longmont to make way for an expected 150 new employees, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Seagate (Nasdaq: STX) will construct lab and office space in a currently unused area of the building and reconfigure other existing spaces to make room for new hires, said Cindy Martini, a Seagate spokeswoman in Longmont. Seagate will hold a job fair in Longmont on Thursday, May 9, to hire new employees - mainly to support new computer storage-drive products.

At least one of the new, high-speed storage drives was designed at the Longmont design-center office of Seagate (Nasdaq: STX), which is incorporated in Dublin, Ireland. Other new storage-drive products are designed at a Minnesota plant. Seagate has about 1,250 employees in Longmont; its principal executive office is in Cupertino, California.

Laptop users who use the new drive designed in Longmont can boot their computers four times faster than they would with a standard computer hard drive and load applications more than two times faster than with a standard hard drive, according to a company press statement.

Seagate will hold a job fair from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., Thursday, May 9, at the Longmont location at 389 Disc Drive, near the intersection of Nelson and Airport roads.

While specific retail prices for the storage drives were not immediately available, another Seagate hard drive in its Momentus series has a retail list price of $179.99 on Amazon.com.

The Longmont design center opened in 2000 to consolidate the work of nine smaller workspaces scattered around the city. Seagate has more than 55,000 employees at locations around the globe.