Western Digital

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Western Digital Corporation

logo
legal form Corporation
ISIN US9581021055
founding April 23, 1970
Seat San Jose (California)
management
  • David Goeckeler ( CEO )
  • Mark P. Long (President, Financial Officer, Principal Accounting Officer)
  • Michael Cordano President, Chief Operating Officer
  • Mathew E. Massengill (Chairman of the Board)
Number of employees 71,600 (2018)
sales US $ 20.647 billion (2018)
Branch Computer hardware
Website westerndigital.com

Western Digital Corporation (often simply abbreviated to WDC or WD ) is a manufacturer of hard disk drives and storage products headquartered in San José, California .

Company history

1970s

The company was founded on April 23, 1970 as General Digital and was first a manufacturer of test equipment for MOS semiconductors. It quickly became a specialized semiconductor manufacturer. In July 1971 it was given its current name and the company headquarters were relocated to Newport Beach , California . A short time later, the UART WD1402A, the first proprietary product, came onto the market.

During the 1970s, WD made a living selling pocket calculator chips and was their largest independent manufacturer in 1975. Due to the oil crisis and the bankruptcy of the largest customer Bowmar Instrument , the economic situation of the company deteriorated dramatically, so that in 1976 even Chapter 11 bankruptcy had to be filed. But WD could free themselves from the predicament and brought with MCP-1600 - CPU and the WD1771 -Laufwerks controller several milestones on the market.

1980s

Western Digital
Older Logo
Hard disk controller WD1002A-WX1

WD has been manufacturing hard drive controllers since the early 1980s . For example, they supplied the controller for the IBM PC AT with the WD1003 . In 1986 this chip became the basis for the ATA interface, which WD developed together with Compaq and the MPI division of Control Data (now part of Seagate ).

Also in 1986, with the purchase of the graphics card manufacturer Paradise Systems , WD entered the graphics card market. In-house graphics chips have also been developed to match. WD was also active in the chipset market (through the purchase of Faraday in 1987) and the network market.

All of these businesses were doing well, but controller chips remained the primary source of revenue. In 1986, WD launched the WD33C93, the first single-chip SCSI controller, which was also used for the first 16-bit bus mastering SCSI controller WD7000 "FASST" . In 1987, the WD37C65, the first single-chip controller for PC / AT floppy drives, came onto the market, which is considered to be the forefather of today's super I / O chips. As early as 1988, the WD42C22 "Vanilla" was the first single-chip ATA controller.

With the takeover of the hard disk division of Tandon in 1988, the direction of WD changed. A short time later, the Centaur hard drives were brought onto the market.

1990s

In 1995 Paradise Systems was sold to Philips .

2000s

Western Digital WD400 40GB and 7,200 min -1
Western Digital WD740 Raptor 74 GB and 10,000 min -1 SATA
Two Western Digital 1 TB VelociRaptors WD1000DHTZ

In 2001, WD launched the first mainstream hard drives with an 8MB cache . 2003 was awarded the Raptor WDC360GD - a SATA drive with 10,000 min -1 and 36 GB of memory - introduced a hard drive for low-cost servers and workstations, which in terms of speed and reliability in the range of more expensive SCSI -Laufwerken and Standard drives. At the beginning of 2008, WD launched the VelociRaptor, a hard drive with even better performance. At the time of publication, the WD1500HLFS and WD3000GLFS / WD3000HLFS drives were available with capacities of 150 and 300 GB. The speed of 10,000 min -1 and the cache with 16 MB are respectively identical to the older Raptor -Laufwerken. The top transfer rates are around 125 MB / s (read) and 120 MB / s (write).

present

In March 2011, Western Digital acquired Hitachi GST for $ 4.3 billion.

In October 2015, Western Digital announced it would buy flash memory specialist SanDisk for $ 19 billion in stock and cash. After the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China approved the acquisition, SanDisk was acquired by Western Digital Technologies, Inc., a WD subsidiary, on May 12, 2016.

In December 2017 it was announced that Western Digital had bought into Esperanto Technologies owned by SPARC developer and Transmeta founder Dave Ditzel. The chips with the open processor architecture RISC-V , in which Esperanto has specialized, will one day also be used in hard disk or SSD controllers from Western Digital.

In October 2018, as part of the presentation of its quarterly figures, Western Digital announced that it would reduce wafer production by 10 to 15 percent in 2019. The reason for the production restrictions is the sharp drop in the price of flash memories.

Innovations

Western Digital is responsible for some innovations, including:

  • 1971: WD1402A, the first single-chip UART
  • 1976: WD1771, the first single-chip floppy disk drive controller
  • 1981: WD1010, the first single-chip ST506 controller
  • 1983: WD1003 hard disk controller, forerunner of ATA
  • 1986: ATA together with Compaq and Control Data developed
  • 1986: WD33C93, one of the first SCSI chips
  • 1987: WD7000, the first bus mastering - ISA - SCSI controller
  • 1987: WD37C65, the first single-chip PC / AT floppy disk drive controller
  • 1988: WD42C22, the first single-chip ATA hard disk controller
  • 2001: The first mainstream hard drives with 8 MB cache
  • 2003: The first SATA drive with 10,000 min -1
  • 2004: Western Digital Media Center, the first memory card reader combined with a hard drive
  • 2009: Western Digital manufactures the first 2 TB hard drive, with four magnetic disks of 500 GB each
  • 2009: Western Digital produces the first 1 TB hard drive in 2.5 "format
  • 2010: Western Digital introduces the revised VelociRaptor hard drives, which are again named the fastest hard drives in the world
  • 2010: Western Digital introduces the first 3 TB hard drive with four magnetic disks of 750 GB each
  • 2012: WD VelociRaptor WD1000DHTZ - the first hard drive with 1 TB and 10,000 revolutions per minute
  • 2012: WD20NPVT (Scorpio Green), the first 2.5 "hard drive with a capacity of 2 TB (height: 15 mm)
  • 2012: Western Digital introduces the first hard drives for NAS storage with the WD Red series
  • 2014: Western Digital introduces the Purple series
  • 2015: With the Ae series, Western Digital presents its first archive hard drives

Internal hard drives

Western Digital distinguishes its products with different colors and names so that they can be assigned to the various areas of application. While hard drives for home users used to be called Caviar , or Scorpio for 2.5 ″ drives , nowadays only the color names are used (e.g. WD Blue )

Desktop drives:

Surname Guarantee (in years) Revolutions (min −1 ) operation area
WD Blue 2 5400/7200 Standard memory for everyday use
WD Blue SSHD 3 7200 Hybrid hard drive with additional internal 8GB SSD
WD Green 2 5400 Energy-saving storage for external solutions, which has a little less power
WD Black 5 7200 Desktop storage with increased performance

Drives for notebooks:

Surname Guarantee (in years) Revolutions (min −1 ) operation area
WD Blue 2 5400 Standard memory for everyday use
WD Blue SSHD 3 5400 Hybrid hard drive with additional internal 8GB SSD
WD Green 2 5400 Energy-saving storage for external solutions, which has a little less power
WD Black 5 7200 Notebook storage with increased performance
WD Black² 5 7200 Notebook memory with additional flash memory

NAS storage:

Surname Guarantee (in years) Revolutions (min −1 ) operation area
WD Red 3 5400 NAS storage for devices with 1–8 bays
WD Red Pro 5 7200 NAS storage for devices with 8–16 bays

Datacenter:

Surname Guarantee (in years) Revolutions (min −1 ) operation area
WD SE 5 7200 Inexpensive storage solution for data centers
WD RE + 5 7200 Storage solutions for high capacities and increased performance
WD Ae 3 5760 Archive hard drives for long-term storage (with sometimes atypical capacities such as 6.3 TB)
WD gold 5 7200 Storage solution for data centers for long-term storage high reliability
WD UltraStar 5 7200 Storage solution for data centers for long-term storage high reliability

Monitoring:

Surname Guarantee (in years) Revolutions (min −1 ) operation area
WD Purple 3 5400 Streaming with up to 8 drives and up to 32 cameras
WD Purple NV 3 5400 Storage for up to 64 HD cameras

Other solutions:

Surname Guarantee (in years) Revolutions (min −1 ) operation area
WD RE 5 7200 Server storage for processing large amounts of data (for data centers, NAS and surveillance)
WD AV 3 7200 Hard drives for digital video recorders
WD Raptor 5 10,000 Hard drives with high performance and S-ATA interface for low-cost servers and workstations
WD VelociRaptor 5 10,000 Hard drives with high performance and S-ATA interface for low-cost servers and workstations

Web links

Commons : Western Digital  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Corporate Leadership, Executive Officers. In: westerndigital.com. Retrieved June 9, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b Annual Report 2018 (PDF)
  3. ↑ Western Digital acquires Hitachi GST for $ 4.3 billion , MacTechNews on March 7, 2011
  4. ↑ http://winfuture.de/news,89359.html
  5. ^ Announcement from finanzen.net of October 21, 2015.
  6. ^ SanDisk Announces Final Regulatory Approval for Acquisition by Western Digital. Acquisition expected to close on May 12, 2016. Business Wire, May 10, 2016, accessed May 23, 2016 .
  7. ↑ Western Digital develops RISC-V controllers for hard drives with Transmeta founder. heise.de, December 1, 2017, accessed December 4, 2017 .
  8. ↑ Flash memory: WD wants to restrict production . heise.de. October 28, 2018. Retrieved October 29, 2018.