WD IS BUILDING BETTER HARD DRIVES FOR THE NEW PC AND CLOUD COMPUTING ERA

Company Launches New Products, Demonstrates Future Capabilities at Computex Taipei 2013

Kuala Lumpur – 11 June 2013 – During a press event in Taipei on 3rd June, WD®, a Western Digital company, shared its vision for the role hard drives play in the future of personal computing. Spokespersons Matt Rutledge, vice president and general manager, client computing, and Pat Wilkison, cloud products, announced two new products and described the company’s innovations in the areas of thin-and-light PC storage, solid-state hybrid drives and data center storage – all of which being a focus of WD innovation during today’s changing PC landscape and relentless global data growth.

According to WD, the PC is undergoing a transformation in form factor and feature sets, contributing to an evolving disaggregated storage model. Leading manufacturers are driving new, compelling products for consumers who are quickly adapting to the mobile advantages of smartphones and tablets, yet whose data collection and content creation habits demand the capacity of traditional hard drives. Additionally, the cornerstone of the disaggregated model is cloud datacenter, where the immense capacity that only hard drives can serve is required.

Rutledge demonstrated how hard drives could be designed in the future to enable affordable high-capacity storage in tablets and other always-on, ultra-portable and low-profile computing devices by utilizing special free-fall and shock sensors; robust mechanics; miniaturized electronics; and software intelligence that manages the use of NAND for data buffering and uninterrupted content experiences for consumers.

The company’s 5 mm thick, 2.5-inch WD Black™ SSHD is now being evaluated by OEM customers, who, with that technology, can design ultra-thin notebooks and other low-profile devices with as much as 500 GB of storage, yet for a fraction of the cost of an SSD.

WD introduced the world’s thinnest 1 TB hard drive with its new 2.5-inch WD Blue™ 7 mm hard drive, which offers OEMs, channel integrators and consumers a unique storage solution for thin and light systems, slimmer notebooks, as well as compatibility with the industry-standard 9.5 mm drive slots of mainstream notebooks.

Wilkison presented the evolving model for cloud datacenters, which are providing massive, scale-out service for social media sites, content services for mobile devices and commercial cloud storage. He outlined the tiered building blocks of today’s datacenters, dominated by the highest capacity, most reliable hard drives to facilitate annual data growth of more than 30 percent; as well as WD's series of high-capacity and high-performance drives and where they fit in the datacenter ecosystem.

The company unveiled the first enterprise-class hard drives for scale-out datacenter market, the WD Se family of drives. Built on an enterprise-grade platform for reliable 24x7x365 datacenter operation, WD Se is tailored to deliver the right combination of performance, reliability and robustness for large-scale replicated environments, mid-sized network attached storage (NAS) deployment, and backup/archiving applications.