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WD was founded in 1970. The company's storage products are
marketed to leading OEMs, systems manufacturers, selected resellers and
retailers under the Western Digital® and WD brand names. Visit
www.westerndigital.com to access more information.
See also:-
Western
Digital - editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com
- editor's comments:- November 2009 - For many years WD was the clear
#2 largest hard drive company measured by revenue. But its growth in market
share and revenue have whittled away at the gap between it and its one time
rotating storage nemesis Seagate.
More interesting in the long term future - is WD's already strong
position in the fast growing SSD market - where it is ranked in the
top 10 SSD oems.
more comments below from
Storage History
In
March 2009 -
Western Digital
entered the SSD market by acquiring
SiliconSystems.
Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known
as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD's existing Branded
Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business
units. WD has published a
FAQs page about
this acquisition.
Editor's comments:- from the time when
SiliconSystems first appeared on our SSD pages in 2004 it was clear that the
company was talking in a different way to the rest of the market. Of the 4 main
market segments which I identified for
SSD market
penetration (published 2005) - I mentioned SiliconSystems as the pioneer in
"High Reliability DAS".
Quoting from that article - "The
customer value proposition of the High Reliability DAS SSD is that the interval
between server failures will be extended by several years compared to HDD
technology."
In recent years the company has avoided being sucked
along the alternative currents of the small form factor SSD market and stuck to
its mission of designing SSDs which are sustainable for customers to own - as
reliable
replacements for hard
drives. The company's acquisition by WD demonstrates that those principles
are valued where it counts - in the eyes of the world's fastest growing hard
disk maker.
In November 2009 -
Western Digital
announced volume shipments of its 1st
2.5" 10K
RPM SAS hard drive. The WD S25 provides up to 300 GB of high-performance
storage suitable for both mission-critical enterprise server and enterprise
storage applications, such as high-I/O-driven applications and configurations,
as well as data centers and large data arrays.
Editor's comments:- 15K RPM hard drives are obsolete for new
designs - because if you want acceleration - you get more server bang per buck
using 2.5" SSDs.
But in the 10K area HDDs can still deliver high capacity with tolerable
performance and lower cost than SSDs.
In order to optimize overall economy,
reliability and
performance - the well architected enterprise storage systems of the near term
future will lean towards using more 10K RPM (and slower)
hard drives - for bulk
content - and towards using various levels of SSDs for performance. In the long
term it will all be solid state - but that's still 10 years away.
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