Western Digital Corporation is a manufacturer of integrated circuits and storage products. Its brand name is often abbreviated to WD and is almost synonym with hard disk drives. The company was founded in 1970 as General Digital and started off as a manufacturer of MOS semiconductor test equipment. A year later, it adopted its current name and produced the world’s first single-chip UART, known as the WD1402A. Among some of its well known innovations include single-chip floppy disk controllers (WD1771), single-chip ST-506 controllers (WD1010), hard disk controller (WD1003) which later on lead to the development of ATA with Compaq and Control Data, SCSI interface chips (WD33C93), bus-mastering ISA SCSI controllers (WD7000), single-chip PC/ AT-compatible floppy disk controllers (WD37C65), single-chip ATA hard disk controllers (WD 42C22), the introduction of Caviar drives, mass market IDE drives, and SATA drives which could run at 10,000 rpm.
Western Digital Products
Western Digital External Storage
Western Digital produces external hard disk drives under the My Book series and the WD Elements that are suitable for the purpose of adding more storage space to your computer. It also offers portable external hard disk drives such as the WD Passport series and the WD Elements portable. Not only that, it also has certain models from the My Book series and the WD ShareSpace which allows you to centralize your storage so you can share data over a network. Besides that, Western Digital also manufacturers external hard disk drives which are specific to the needs of Mac users.
Western Digital Home Entertainment
Under this category, Western Digital manufacturers media players and HD media players which allow you to play USB storage devices on flat panel TVs. Besides that, they also offer the WD DVR Expander that allows you to gain extra available storage space.
Western Digital Internal Storage
Western Digital also produces internal storage devices meant to be built-in for desktops, mobile devices, enterprise and CE.
Western Digital Solid State Storage
Western Digital also produces solid state storage devices which are now in its third generation under the brand name SiliconDrive.