Western Digital
Western Digital Corporation ( often simply abbreviated to WD ) is a major manufacturer of hard disk drives with headquarters in Lake Forest / California and has a long history as a manufacturer of ICs and memory products.
Over time, Western Digital made especially hard drives, tape drives, hard disks and floppy disk controllers, graphics chips, and many other ICs. Meanwhile, the company produces only IDE, SAS and SATA hard drives in the 3.5 "- 2.5 " - and one "format.
History
1970
The company was founded on 23 April 1970 as General Digital, and was initially a manufacturer of test equipment for MOS -type semiconductor. She quickly became a specialized semiconductor manufacturer. In July 1971, she was given its present name, and the company headquarters was moved to Newport Beach / California. A short time later, with the UART WD1402A the first own product to market.
During the 1970s, WD made his money mainly by selling chips for calculators and 1975 was the largest independent manufacturer. Due to the oil crisis and the bankruptcy of the largest customers Bowmar Instrument, the economic situation of the company deteriorated dramatically, so that in 1976 even for Chapter 11 bankruptcy had to be notified. But WD was able to free himself from the predicament and brought to the MCP -1600 CPU and the WD1771 hard disk controller several milestones on the market.
1980
Since the early 1980s represents WD hard disk controller ago. So they provided about the WD1003 controller for the IBM PC AT. This chip was the basis for the ATA interface, the WD developed along with Compaq and the MPI Department of Control Data ( now belonging to Seagate ) 1986.
Also in 1986, with the purchase of the video card manufacturer's Paradise Systems, WD entered the graphics card market. Matching your own graphics chips have been developed. In addition, WD was still in the chipset market operates ( by purchasing Faraday 1987) and in the network market.
All these business went well, but the main contributor to sales remained the controller chips. So WD In 1986, with the WD33C93 the first single -chip SCSI controller on the market, which was also used for the first 16 -bit bus mastering SCSI controller WD7000 " FASST ". In 1987, with the WD37C65 the first single -chip controller for PC / AT floppy drives on the market, the I / O chip is regarded as the forefather of today's supercomputers. In 1988 followed with the WD42C22 "Vanilla ", the first single-chip ATA controller.
With the acquisition of the hard disk drive business of Tandon 1988, the alignment of WD changed drastically. A short time later, the Centaur disks were placed on the market.
1990
1995 Paradise Systems was sold to Philips.
Presence
2001 brought the first mainstream WD hard drives with 8 MB cache on the market. In 2003, with the Raptor WDC360GD - a SATA drive with 10,000 min -1 and 36 GB memory - presented a hard drive for low- cost servers and workstations, as far as speed and reliability, and in the area between the considerably more expensive SCSI drives Standard drives is. Beginning of 2008 brought WD VelociRaptor with a hard drive with an even higher performance on the market. At the time of the show there was the drives WD1500HLFS and WD3000GLFS / WD3000HLFS with capacities of 150 and 300 GB. The speed of 10,000 min -1 and a cache with 16 MB are identical to the older Raptor drives. The transfer rates are in the peak at about 125 MB / s (read) and 120 MB / s (write).
In March 2011, Western Digital, Hitachi GST took over for 4.3 billion U.S. dollars.
Innovations
Western Digital was responsible for several innovations, including:
Products for home users
Western Digital breaks down the hard drive section for home users in different categories. In every hard drives are offered by different sizes; the model names differ beyond internal performance differences.
Hot Categories
- Caviar Green,
- Caviar Blue,
- Caviar Black,
- Caviar Red,
- Caviar Purple,
- VelociRaptor and
- AV.
In the model Caviar Green energy-efficient desktop drives are offered. There are slow-moving and thus offered quiet and energy -saving drives at reasonable prices. They are operated at a speed of 5400 min-1. Opposite drives at higher speeds have Caviar Green drives the disadvantages that the average access time is greater and the data transfer rate is less.
The desktop drives the series Caviar Blue offer shorter access times, better transfer rates and good value for money with a speed of 7200 min -1.
Also with 7200 min-1 Western Digital offers the high-performance desktop model Caviar Black. These models have an additional controller chip and larger cache, which may increase the data throughput rate.
Drives the model Caviar Red aimed at users of network storage. The plates run around at a speed of 5400 min -1. Plates in this series are designed for continuous operation (24 /7) and therefore have a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours.
As the Caviar Black is also directed the series VelociRaptor 10,000 min-1 at enthusiasts. Here high transfer rates and low access times are achieved, they provide up to 1000 GB of memory.
2014, the product range to include the branch Caviar Purple was extended, and with the it is specially designed for surveillance systems boards. It supports up to 32 HD cameras, as capacities are 1 to 4 terabytes available.
The AV model is provided according to the requirements for use in digital recording and playback devices such as hard disk recorders. These hard drives are designed for low operating temperature and power-saving and quiet operation. They are also in contrast to PC hard drives optimized to process multiple data streams simultaneously prolonged.