Posted 11/03/09 at 03:21:08 PM by Bart Salisbury

Western Digital, the world’s second largest hard driver manufacturer and a favorite of the masses, has decided to play with the big boys, announcing their first hard drive for the enterprise storage market.

The enterprise market is made up of big business, which places heavy, mission critical demands on their hard drives. You need some serious hard drive storage if you plan to offer email, web applications, or cloud-computing services. Drives that can handle the stress long-term, with little chance of failure are favored in this market, currently dominated by Seagate and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Western Digital’s first offering is the WD S25, available in 147 Gb and 300 Gb capacities. The drive, which has a 2.5-inch form factor, spins at 10,000 RPMs. It also includes the technologically necessary Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, either SAS 3 Gb/s or SAS 6 Gb/s. While similar in appearance to Western Digital’s VelociRaptor, it has faster read and write seek times, and a higher MTBF rating of 1.6 million hours.

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Posted 10/23/09 at 03:06:02 PM by Paul Lilly

Recession? Tech slump? Losses? Apparently these are all things Western Digital is not familiar with, even if just about everyone else in the tech industry is. The hard drive maker today reported record quarterly revenue of $2.2 billion, and that's not the only record that was set.

Hard drive shipments also hit a record high totaling 44.1 million units for the quarter. All tallied, Western Digital pulled in net income of $288 million, or $1.25 per share, for its first fiscal quarter ended October 2, 2009.

"For the second consecutive quarter, demand for hard drives was stronger than expected as the positive industry conditions that materialized in the June quarter continued throughout the September quarter," said John Coyne, president and chief executive office. "We believe that demand is being driven primarily by consumers as a result of the growing social media phenomenon. This is creating demand in mobile and desktop PCs, branded products, and enterprise storage."

Western Digital went on to say that its hard drive inventories remain at historically low levels. And going forward, the hard drive maker says demand remains strong, so the good times should continue.

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Posted 10/22/09 at 10:30:00 PM by Nathan Edwards

After months of making do with 5,400rpm and 5,900rpm 2TB drives and odd-bird 1.5TB drives, it’s finally happening: 7,200rpm two-terabyte hard drives are coming to rigs near you. First out of the gate and into our greedy arms is Western Digital’s 2TB Caviar Black, the performance cousin to the 2TB Caviar Green we reviewed in May. And brother, it’s just what we’ve been waiting for.

The 2TB Caviar Black is spec’d to impress, with four 500GB platters, two processors, 64MB of cache, and a dual-stage actuator system that puts a fine-tuned piezoelectric actuator head at the end of the standard magnetic actuator, enabling fine-tuned tracking for speedy seek times. The Caviar Black also comes with WD’s standard No-Touch ramp loader, so the read/write head never comes in contact with the platters, increasing the drive’s lifespan.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

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Posted 10/14/09 at 10:00:00 PM by Norman Chan

Possibly the media pirate's perfect movie and music streamer

 Yesterday, Western Digital officially announced the second generation of their WD TV HD media player. In our review of the original device, we loved its ability to play back almost any video we tossed at it, but lamented its inability to handle encrypted media files. Since then, Western Digital has issued a series of firmware updates that improve format compatibility (including DivX), but the new WD TV Live adds new hardware features as well. Most notable is the addition of an Ethernet port to connect the WD TV Live to your home network. That means you can not only stream movies from your desktop PC or NAS boxes to the WD TV Live, but also get video, music, and photo content from the internet. We received a retail sample of the new system, and tested it to see if these new features are worth the $50 price bump. 

Read on for our unboxing and impressions!

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Posted 10/13/09 at 07:41:28 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Western Digital has announced the second iteration of its TV connected media player. The new WD TV Live HD takes all that was awesome about the old, and adds some new tricks. The box still has wide codec support for playing files from USB drives, but it now also streams content from Youtube, Pandora, and Flickr. Users can also connect network drives to the new version to view files.

The WD TV Live HD, as the name would suggest, outputs 1080P HD video via a HDMI 1.3 port. Composite and component are also available. If you need to get video off that USB drive and on to your TV, the WD TVs provide an attractive alternative to media center PCs. The new WD TV device has an MSRP of $149.99.

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Posted 09/15/09 at 08:11:16 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Three hard drive manufacturers have announced new products in a shockingly short time frame. Toshiba is releasing a new 1.8 inch drive for MP3 players, with capacities from 60 to 160GB. In the slightly larger 2.5 inch form factor, Toshiba is offering 640GB drive suitable for notebooks.

Western Digital is also offering a 640GB, 2.5 inch drive. This new Scorpio Blue model is thin enough to fit in any standard laptop drive bay. The 640 GB drive will retail for about $145 at launch. Western Digital’s 750GB and 1TB Scorpios are three platter drives, and are too thick to fit in most standard notebooks.

Hitachi’s new offerings are in the 3.5 inch space. The company’s new 1TB CinemaStar 7K1000.C should be shipping by year’s end. A second Hitachi 1TB drive, the 5K1000 CoolSpin, is designed to be quieter at the expense of speed. It only spins at 5400rpm instead of 7200rpm like the 7K1000.C. No pricing was announced.

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Posted 09/09/09 at 12:11:16 PM by Paul Lilly

Western Digital today said it has commenced volume shipments of its 2.5-inch WD Scorpio Blue 640GB hard drives designed for notebooks.

The tiny drives pack 640GB into a single unit by way of 320GB per platter technology, making them the highest capacity 2.5-inch hard drives in the industry standard 9.5mm, 2-disk form factor yet available. On the energy efficiency front, WD claims its capacious Scropio Blue drive consumes 30 percent less power than previous generation WD Scorpio Blue models.

Other features include WD's WhisperDrive technology, which the company describes as a "state-of-the-art seeking algorithm" to reduce drive noise, ShockGuard technology for better shock tolerance should you drop or otherwise jostle your notebook, and IntelliSeek technology, which dynamically adjusts seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.

The Scorpio Blue 640GB is shipping now through select distributors and resellers with an MSRP set at $149.

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Posted 09/01/09 at 12:30:04 PM by Paul Lilly

Western Digital today starting shipping its new desktop 7200 RPM 2TB hard drive to OEMs and becomes the second manufacturer to offer the high spindle speed and capacity combination (Hitachi being the first).

As part of the WD Caviar Black series, the 2TB model is based on the company's 500GB-per-platter technology. Other features include a heaping 64MB of cache, dual stage actuator technology, SATA 3Gb/s, an integrated dual processor, and NoTouch ramp load technology, which ensures the recording head never touches the disk media and, according to WD, results in significantly less wear and tear on the drive.

Western Digital's speedy 2TB drive is available now with an MSRP of $299.

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