Western Digital's hard drive operations in Thailand spent part of the company's second fiscal quarter ended December 30, 2011 waterlogged after severe flooding ravaged the area, but if it was time to sink or swim, WD chose the latter. Remarkably, the hard drive maker still managed to ship 28.5 million HDD units during its second fiscal quarter, pulling in $2 billion in revenue and profiting $145 million.
Western Digital's WD TV media player family just got a little bit better with the addition of streaming movie service Vudu. That's in addition to several new sports and entertainment services WD rolled out to the WD TB Live and WD TV Live Hub media players, both of which are already content rich with support for Netflix, Hulu Plus, Blockbuster, CinimaNow, Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Facebook, and a bunch of others.
It seems like every time we touch on the topic of hard drives lately, it's always bad news related to the recent flooding in Thailand. Ready for a change of pace? Good, because that's what you're getting today. Instead of news of more shortages and rising prices, we've now learned that hard drive volumes in the first quarter of 2012 will increase by several million units, decreasing the supply gap "significantly."
Hard drive maker Western Digital announced this morning that on November 18, 2011, an arbitration award of $525 million was rendered against the company by a sole arbitrator in a pending confidential arbitration action in Minnesota brought on by Seagate. Not included in that amount is prejudgement interest, which will be determined and tacked on at a later date.
Now is not the time to buy a mechanical hard drive, not unless you absolutely have to. As you know, the recent flooding in Thailand hit the hard drive industry pretty hard (from a technology standpoint -- obviously the biggest tragedy here is the impact it had on people's lives), and even just a 1TB hard drive is going to set you back about $150 street, almost triple what they selling for prior to the flood. Is the shortage really that bad?
Severe flooding in Thailand forced Western Digital to temporarily 
We've been duly impressed with Western Digital's media streamers, handing out high marks to both the WD TV Live and WD TV Live Hub in our reviews (
For those of you who always dreamed about having your own cloud, Western Digital wants to make your dreams come true with its new WD 2go and WD 2go Pro mobile apps for its My Book Live personal cloud storage solution. The part about dreams is admittedly cheesy (and we're to blame for that one), but as far as the personal cloud goes, that's what Western Digital envisions as you remotely connect to your My Book Live drive from any computer or through your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or compatible Android device.
It used to be that if you were looking to put together a high end rig with as few compromises as possibles, you rolled with a Western Digital Velociraptor. Today enthusiasts are more likely to opt for a solid state drive when looking to address the storage bottleneck at any cost, but this shift in power hasn't yet rendered the Velociraptor extinct (or if it has, somebody forget to tell Western Digital).
It wasn't that long ago the largest notebook hard drive you could buy was 500GB. Now here comes Western Digital with its newly announced WD Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drive for mainstream notebooks, and it isn't even the first of its kind. It is, however, one of just two 1TB hard drives built around the industry standard 9.5mm, 2.5-inch form factor (Samsung's Spinpoint M8 being the other) instead of the 12.5mm thickness standard, which means it's compatible with nearly all existing laptops.Connect with MaximumPC
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