Company western digitalaka WDaka WDC is one of the leading manufacturers of storage systems. The company gained particular fame as a manufacturer of hard drives.
Founded western digital was April 23, 1970 a certain Alvin Phillips (Alvin Phillips), a former engineer of the company Motorola. At first, the company was named General Digital Corporation. But in July of the following year it was renamed.
At first, the company was engaged in the production of chips for calculators. In 1975 WDC was even the world's largest manufacturer in this business. In 1976, the production of controllers for floppy drives begins. And in 1983, expanding the business, begins the production of hard disk controllers. The experience turned out to be successful. At the same time, the company tries itself in the production of other computer components. Now few people know, but WDC produced video cards (for this purpose, the company Paradise Systems) and SCSI controllers.
In 1988, the company began producing hard drives themselves. The thing went. The company's hard drives are quickly becoming popular. The company's management decides to focus on this particular business and sell off the remaining assets. Video card business moved to Philips Semiconductors (since then Paradise Systems does not exist), the SCSI chip business went to Adaptec, and the production of network controllers and hard disk controllers acquired SMC Networks. In 1990, a line of hard drives was introduced to the world caviar.
1998 WDC enters into an agreement with IBM, which gives it access to some technologies, such as GMR (Giant Magneto-Resistive - giant magnetoresistive heads) and production facilities. As a result, a line of hard drives appears Expert.
To this day, the company deals exclusively with hard drives. And very successfully. Although at the end of the last century, her reputation was somewhat tarnished by history, when a whole series of hard drives turned out to be defective. But WDC quickly managed to rectify the situation. In addition to conventional hard drives, miniature models for laptops, external drives and network attached storage (NAS) are also produced. The company owns many trademarks: Caviar, My Book, My Passport, Raptor, VelociRaptor …
March 2009 WDC announced the acquisition of a manufacturer of flash memory SiliconSystems. Thus, another direction appeared - the production of SSD solid-state drives, which turned out to be serious opponents of traditional hard drives.
The company's head office is located in Lake Forest, California (Lake Forest, California, USA). Its design bureaus are also located in the same state. Production facilities are concentrated in Asia: Thailand and Malaysia.
