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Western Digital Hard Drives
Western Digital hard drives and western digital external hard drives are manufactured by the Western Digital Corporation. This company is based in Lake Forest, California and employs over 50,000 people worldwide.
The main manufacturing facilities are in California, Thailand, and Malaysia. This company along with Seagate Technologies Inc., round out the top two when it comes to hard disk drive manufacturing.
Western Digital History
Western Digital entered the hard disk drive market in 1988 with the acquisition of Tandon’s hard drive manufacturing facilities. Tandon presently focusses on flash memory storage and is becoming one of the largest manufacturers in the world for this type of storage media. WD Corporation was actually established in 1970, much earlier than 1988 and for the first ten years focused on semiconductor chip manufacturing. In the 1980s, Western Digital began manufacturing hard disk drive controllers and this eventually led to hard disk drive production.
After their purchase of Tandon, the first line of hard drives was called the Centaur series. In 1991, the familiar and highly successful Western Digital Caviar hard drives were introduced into the marketplace. Eventually, WD teamed up with IBM and with access to some of their hard drive technologies, were able to produce an expert line of high quality products, which made them very competitive with other hard disk drive manufacturers.
Western Digital Hard Drives
Western Digital hard drives provide durability, speed, and high capacity for storage of all types of digital information in a wide range of applications such as desktop computers, laptop or notebook computers, mobile devices, business networks, and even home entertainment devices.
In the past, the WD hard drive product line for desktop computers was the Caviar line. For notebooks, there was the Scorpio line of 2.5-inch hard drives. For servers, NAS (network attached storage devices), SANs (storage area networks), workstations, RAID servers, medical imaging, gaming and video/broadcast applications, WD product lines were called VelociRaptor and WD.
Products are also available for various home entertainment products including personal video recorders. Western Digital external hard drives are very flexible and convenient to use, whether extra storage is required for an existing computer or for computer backup applications. The external hard drive My Book product line was used for desktop computers. For portable applications, Western digital had the WD Elements product line and the My Passport line.
Recently, the names of the products have changed, and include WD Black, WD Blue, WD Red, and WD Purple, for everyday computing, gaming, NAS, and surveillance. For Enterprise applications, there is the Ultrastar line of hard disk drives. More information on Western Digital hard disk drives and the Western Digital company itself is available at the Western Digital website.