Full Description

Western Digital Corporation (WD) designs, develops, manufactures and sells hard drives. The Company sells its products worldwide to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) for use in computer systems, subsystems or consumer electronics (CE) devices, and to distributors, resellers and retailers. Its hard drives are used in desktop computers, notebook computers, and enterprise applications, such as servers, workstations, network attached storage, storage area networks and video surveillance equipment. Additionally, its hard drives are used in CE applications, such as digital video recorders (DVRs), and satellite and cable set-top boxes (STBs). WD also sells its hard drives as stand-alone storage products and integrates them into finished enclosures, embedding application software and offering the products as WD-branded external storage appliances for personal data backup and portable or expanded storage of digital music, photographs, video and other digital data. On March 27, 2009, it completed the acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc.

The Company’s hard drives include 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factor drives, having capacities ranging from 40 gigabytes to 2 terabytes, nominal rotation speeds up to 10,000 revolutions per minute (RPM), and offer interfaces, including both Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics (EIDE) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA). It also embed its hard drives into WD-branded external storage appliances using interfaces, such as USB 2.0, external SATA, FireWire and Ethernet network connections with capacities of 160 gigabytes up to 8 terabytes. In addition, it offers a family of hard drives specifically designed to consume substantially less power than standard drives, utilizing its WD GreenPower Technology.

The Company offers a line of hard drives designed for various markets. It markets its hard drives under brand names, including WD Caviar, WD RE, WD VelociRaptor, WD Scorpio, WD Elements, WD AV, My Passport, My Book, My DVR Expander and WD GreenPower Technology. These hard drives service the desktop, mobile, enterprise, CE and branded products markets, and can be found in products, including desktop computers, notebook computers, enterprise storage, workstations, video surveillance equipment, networking products, DVRs, STBs and external storage appliances. It also offers a line of WD-branded media players under the WD TV brand name, as well as a line of solid-state drives under the SiliconDrive brand name.

Desktop Hard Drive Products

The hard drives the Company designs for the desktop personal computer (PC) market consist of 3.5-inch form factor products with capacities ranging from 40 gigabytes to 2 terabytes. These products utilize either the EIDE or SATA interfaces. The type of EIDE interface used in its hard drives is ATA/100, which signifies a burst data transfer rate of 100 megabytes per second. The SATA interface available in many of its hard drives enables burst transfer rates of up to three gigabits per second.

Mobile Hard Drive Products

The Company’s hard drives used in mobile products typically include 2.5-inch form factor drives for notebook computers. Although the desktop PC market accounts for a majority of hard drive sales, unit shipments of hard drives for notebook computers represent a growing share of the total. Its seventh generation of the WD Scorpio product family offers up to one terabyte of capacity. It also provides its customers with a line of 2.5-inch mobile drives.

Enterprise Hard Drive Products

The Company offers multiple product lines to address enterprise market needs. The WD VelociRaptor drive is a 300 gigabytes, 10,000 RPM, 2.5-inch enterprise-class drive with the SATA interface for enterprise applications requiring high performance and high reliability. The WD RE family of drives have capacities ranging from 160 gigabytes to 2 terabytes. The low-power versions of the WD RE family of drives features WD GreenPower Technology, which reduces power consumption as much as 40% compared with standard hard drives. Both WD VelociRaptor and WD RE drives may be used in, but are not limited to, applications, such as databases, e-commerce and super computing in life science, oil and gas and similar industries, business records management, e-mail, file serving, Web serving, near-line storage, medical records, engineering data management, video broadcasting and video security. The WD VelociRaptor also has been popular for use in the desktop PC market for applications, including gaming and advanced computer aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) systems.

Consumer Electronics Products

The Company offers a line of hard drives under the WD AV brand that are designed for use in products, such as DVRs, STBs, karaoke systems, multi-function printers and gaming systems. It also offers low-power WD AV drive models that feature the WD GreenPower Technology.

Branded Products

The Company sells a line of WD-branded hard drive-based storage appliances, which are internal drives embedded into PC peripheral-style enclosures that have USB 2.0, external SATA, FireWire and Ethernet network connections, and include software that assists customers with back up, remote access and management of digital content. It sells these branded storage appliances, as well as related adapters and accessories, through retail store fronts, online stores and distributors. The products include the 3.5-inch hard drive-based My Book family of storage appliances, the 3.5-inch My DVR Expander series of external SATA (eSATA) and USB 2.0 storage appliances, the WD ShareSpace network-attached storage system, the 2.5-inch hard drive-based My Passport Portable series of USB 2.0 and FireWire storage devices, and 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch internal hard drives packaged with PC installation kits under the WD brand for retail store sales. It also sells a line of WD-branded media players, which are devices that enable users to play digital movies, music and photos from any of its WD branded external hard drives or other USB mass storage devices on a television or home theater system, independent of the PC.

Solid-State Drive Products

The Company offers a line of solid-state drives under the SiliconDrive brand that provides storage technologies for the embedded systems market, which includes network-communications, industrial, medical, military, aerospace, media appliance and data streaming applications. These drives also address the embedded systems market requirements to ensure data integrity, eliminate unscheduled downtime, protect application data and software, and provide for data security and protection through its patented and patent-pending PowerArmor, SiSMART, SolidStor and SiSecure technologies.

The Company competes with Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Seagate Technology, Toshiba Corporation, EMC Corporation, LaCie Group, Melco Holdings Inc., Intel Corporation, Micron Technology, Inc., Smart Modular Technologies, Inc. and STEC, Inc.