Tag archive: Western

Western Digital has unveiled two new additions to its MyPassport Essential SE line of portable USB hard drives: 750 and 1 TB editions. The 1 TB edition represents the top capacity for a portable hard drive, and Western Digital claims to be the first manufacturer to ship a 1 TB portable drive. “The enormous capacity of these new My Passport Essential SE drives makes them the perfect travel-friendly storage device to hold all the rich… Read More

You used to be able to rely on Western Union just for sending money. Now, however, if you receive a notification that there’s a money transfer you haven’t collected, there’s a very good chance it’s malware, according to security company Sophos, which has picked up a crop of spam mails supposedly originating from Western Union. The mail purports to inform you of a money transfer that you’ve never collected,… Read More

Storage maker Western Digital is getting into the solid-state drive (SSD) business, announcing today that it has bought up California SSD supplier SiliconSystems for some $65 million in cash. SiliconSystems has primarily been selling solid-state drives to makers of embedded systems used in industry, the military, aerospace, and medical markets, along with SSD devices used in networking and communications gear. The deal makes Western Digital… Read More

Hard drive maker Western Digital has announced it is laying off some 2,500 employees—or about five percent of its total worldwide workforce—as part of a series of cost-cutting moves designed to bolster the company's bottom lines as the tough economy reduces demand for IT and storage products. The company is also scaling back its revenue forecasts for hard drive sales from $2 to $2.1 billion down to $1.7 to $1.8… Read More

Western Digital’s venerable VelociRaptor drives just made the leap from speedy toys for gamers to serious business-class storage. The company announced the newest version of the ultra-fast drives on Wednesday, which has been specifically tailored for use in blade servers and other mission-critical applications with a 2.5-inch form factor and the industry’s highest ever reliability rating for a SATA drive. Like the earlier… Read More

RAID arrays may offer the perfect blend of performance and massive storage if you have room in a case for them, but for smaller applications, it can be tough to find a drive that balances capacity with snappy speed. Western Digital released its own attempt at compromise on Tuesday with the Caviar Black line of 7200 RPM hard drives, featuring capacities up to one terabyte. With two internal processors, a 32MB cache, and a SATA interface to… Read More

Western Digital has expanded the capacity of its two-platter, 3.5-inch desktop hard drives all the way out to 640 GB, enabling media mavens and RAID fanatics everywhere to cram even more bits, bytes, and streams into their racks, desktop systems, and media servers. the new WD Caviar SE16s offer 3 Gb/s data transfer rates, 16 MB of cache, and 7,200 rpm speeds—with quiet operation and low heat emissions. “The 640 GB capacity… Read More

Notebook drives, though perpetually smaller than their desktop equivalents, still manage to grow seemingly by the month, despite those tiny 2.5-inch confines. Western Digital’s Scorpio line felt that growth on Thursday, with a growth spurt from 250GB of storage in its largest drive to 320GB. The Scorpio 320GB spins at 5400 RPM and can push data at up to 3Gb/s thanks to a SATA connection. Western Digital also claims that the drive’s… Read More

Drive maker and storage vendor Western Digital has agreed to acquire media maker Komag for about $1 billion. Komag is a major manufacturer of thin-film disks of the sort used in hard drives; Western Digital will be funding the acquisition through a combination of cash reserves and proceeds from a secured $1.25 billion loan. “This acquisition is a significant step in the evolution and differentiation of WD as a leader in the… Read More

There's just no limit to how much data you can pack into a 3-and-a-half-inch-wide slot, it seems. Western Digital announced its Caviar SE16 drives on Monday, which sport a whopping 750GB of storage capacity. Besides the huge amount of data the drives  hold, they're capable of moving it at 3GB per second via a Serial ATA (SATA) interface, and come with a 16MB cache. Western Digital also includes a host of other features… Read More

With a small resemblance to a real book, the Western Digital My Book Edition II features RAID 1 technology and a whopping 1 terabyte of storage space. The small catch is that users can specify whether they want the drive to be configured in a RAID setup. If they do, then that 1 TB of storage space slides down to 500GB since the two internal drives are mirroring each other. This will of course provide more security for your information. If… Read More

You might call Western Union one of the first companies to ride the boom in information technology: back in April, 1856, Western Union launched a service exploiting a very hot communication technology: the telegraph. Western Union's claim to fame was their ability to send a message from one end of the U.S. to the other in less than a day. In 1861, the company finished its first transcontinental telegraph line, and since then it's… Read More

From Western Digital's press release: Filed today in United States District Court in Orange County, Calif., the lawsuit alleges that Cornice is infringing seven Western Digital patents related to disk drive technology. Western Digital is seeking to prevent Cornice from illegally using Western Digital patented technology, as well as seeking to recoup monetary damages resulting from patent infringement by products Cornice has already… Read More

From Western Digital's press release: Continuing to deliver the ultimate choice in feature-rich storage products, Western Digital Corp. today introduced its Media Center storage peripheral. The Media Center combines a 250 GB WD Caviar® SE hard drive, an 8-in-1 memory card reader, USB 2.0 hub and the company's exclusive Dual-option Backup feature in one convenient external storage device. Western Digital's Media… Read More