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HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company) today introduced the world’s first 4TB enterprise-class hard drive family, the Ultrastar 7K4000. Ushering in a new generation of 512e Advanced Format drives, the Ultrastar 7K4000 family provides space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for the explosive big data and cloud/Internet markets where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters. Hungry for massive storage, cloud and Internet businesses are redefining the datacenter by designing new types of servers and storage architectures to help manage explosive petabyte (PB) growth. Critical to their datacenter infrastructure is the ability to scale and efficiently manage performance, power and storage space to help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).
The new Ultrastar 7K4000 family addresses enterprise datacenter needs by offering high reliability and a TCO value proposition like no other. As the only 4TB 7,200 RPM enterprise-class drive in the industry, and one with a 2.0 million hours mean time between failure¹ (MTBF) specification, the Ultrastar family is the ultimate solution for 24x7 enterprise applications such as big data, cloud computing, data warehousing, video-on-demand, disk-to-disk backup, and massive scale-out storage implementations.
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Western Digital today announced the next generation of its top-selling My Passport line of portable hard drives, offering consumers a fresh new enclosure design and the first-ever 2 TB capacity in a portable drive. Now available in five popular colors: white, black, silver, blue, and red, with a range of capacities beginning from 500 GB, the new sleeker My Passport portable drives offer digital consumers an appealing array of storage options that reflect their personal style. Additionally, the new My Passport drives offer WD SmartWare™ automatic backup software and WD Security™ for password protection and hardware encryption.
With the addition of premium finishes, specially-engineered to make the outer shell more resistant to scratches and fingerprints, the new My Passport external drives feature ultra-fast USB 3.0 connectivity; USB 2.0 compatibility; continuous, automatic backup software; and password protection with hardware encryption. The included software offers the flexibility to customize the drive to a user's storage preferences: installing all features, just the components needed, or using the drive without the software.The new 2 TB model offers massive capacity in an amazing pocket-sized enclosure, affording plenty of secure storage for all of one's photos, video, music and other important files.
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Western Digital, the world's leader in external storage solutions, is now shipping its first external hard drive with Thunderbolt technology – the My Book Thunderbolt Duo dual-drive storage system. The new My Book Thunderbolt Duo provides professionals and Mac® enthusiasts with five primary areas of performance, double-safe data protection and flexibility; ultra-fast data transfer rates for greater work efficiency; a 4 TB/6 TB large-capacity; customized dual-drive storage system with RAID 0, 1 and JBOD options; customer serviceable drives; and dual Thunderbolt ports for daisy-chaining multiple My Book Thunderbolt Duo devices or other peripherals.
Thunderbolt technology brings a new way to connect high-speed storage devices to any desktop or notebook computer with a Thunderbolt port while delivering unmatched speed for multitasking activities such as, editing video/music, 3D rendering, and completing other high definition graphics-intensive projects.
"Offering lightning-fast throughput in both directions, the new WD Thunderbolt Duo storage systems are just what I need for organizing, editing, and archiving complex High Definition video projects," said Bruce Dorn, DGA (Director's Guild of America). Configurable as either RAID 0 or RAID 1 - and offered in both 4 TB and 6 TB capacities - these new WD Thunderbolt Duo systems are the perfect solution for video filmmakers who are desperate for an uber-fast time sensitive project management solution."
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Seagate has become the first hard drive maker to achieve the milestone storage density of 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per square inch, producing a demonstration of the technology that promises to double the storage capacity of today’s hard drives upon its introduction later this decade and give rise to 3.5-inch hard drives with an extraordinary capacity of up to 60 terabytes over the 10 years that follow. The bits within a square inch of disk space, at the new milestone, far outnumber stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 billion and 400 billion.
Seagate reached the landmark data density with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), the next- generation recording technology. The current hard drive technology, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), is used to record the spectrum of digitized data – from music, photos, and video stored on home desktop and laptop PCs to business information housed in sprawling data centers – on the spinning platters inside every hard drive. PMR technology was introduced in 2006 to replace longitudinal recording, a method in place since the advent of hard drives for computer storage in 1956, and is expected to reach its capacity limit near 1 terabit per square inch in the next few years.
“The growth of social media, search engines, cloud computing, rich media and other data-hungry applications continues to stoke demand for ever greater storage capacity,” said Mark Re, senior vice president of Heads and Media Research and Development at Seagate. “Hard disk drive innovations like HAMR will be a key enabler of the development of even more data-intense applications in the future, extending the ways businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage and store digital content.”
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Western Digital Corp. today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Viviti Technologies Ltd. (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), effective Mar. 8, 2012, for $3.9 billion in cash and 25 million shares of WDC common stock valued at approximately $0.9 billion. Hitachi, Ltd. now owns approximately 10 percent of WDC shares outstanding, and it has the right to designate two individuals to the board of directors of WD.
The new WD will operate with WD Technologies (WD) and HGST as wholly owned subsidiaries. Aggregated revenues of the two companies in 2011 were $15 billion. As chief executive officer of WD, John Coyne heads up the new office of the CEO, with Steve Milligan as president, Tim Leyden as chief operating officer and Wolfgang Nickl as chief financial officer.
"The completion of this acquisition is a truly momentous event in the 42-year history of our company," said Coyne. "With ownership of two successful companies and the best talent available in the industry, we expect to accomplish great things as we build the new WD to be the world's leading storage solutions provider with the industry's deepest technology capability, broadest product portfolio and best-in-class execution. Similar to successful multi-brand models in other industries, the two subsidiaries will compete in the marketplace with separate brands and product lines while sharing common values of customer delight, value creation, consistent profitability and growth."
