The Fair Trade Commission searched the offices of TDK Corp. and NHK Spring Co. on Tuesday on suspicion they formed a price cartel for electronics parts for hard disk drives, sources said.

The two manufacturers of electronics components have allegedly set retail prices for suspensions, which are used for hard drives in personal computers and gaming consoles, in consultation with each other in violation of the anti-monopoly law, the sources said.

Suspensions support a hard drive's magnetic heads that read and regenerate data.

TDK and NHK Spring account for a large share of the suspension market, according to industry sources, but the hard drive market has been shrinking against the backdrop of a decline in demand for PCs.