16 December 2010
On April 23, 1970, a Motorola employee named Alvin B. Phillips founded Western Digital Corporation, now the world’s second largest hard disk drive manufacturing company, second only to Seagate. It was originally named General Digital which had a brief stint at manufacturing metal oxide semiconductor or MOS used in amplifying electronic signals.
Western Digital Corporation has proven its resilience and remains a force to reckon with in the hard drive industry
1970’s
In the early 70’s, WD made money by selling calculator chips and soon became the world’s number 1 manufacturer of calculator chips. However, financial tragedy struck in the mid-70’s so that in 1976, Western Digital declared bankruptcy. There were two big factors which brought about this financial disaster: the oil crisis which caused a drastic loss in purchasing power worldwide and the bankruptcy of its biggest calculator customer, the Bowmar Instrument. Worse, the company’s main provider of start-up capital withdrew its support. The floundering company was forced to stand on its own wobbly feet.
Western Digital Corporation rose up from the slump and produced some landmark products during this time, notably the MCP-1600, a multi-chip microprocessor used by Pascal and DEC and by some floppy disk drive controller chips. The company survived.
1980’s
Western Digital entered the data storage industry during this time. Almost simultaneously, they were making hard disk drive controllers. Then, in 1983, they won the contract to provide IBM with controllers. The controller they produced became the basis for the ATA interface, which has become the interface standard for the connection of storage devices. The immense profits brought about by these controllers not only brought the company back to viability but fueled its corporate growth as well.
Western Digital used their huge income from ATA controllers to venture into being the PC industry’s supplier of general-purpose OEM hardware. Western Digital made graphic cards, core logic chipsets and SCSI controller chips for disk and tape devices which various companies purchased and retailed under their brand names. During this period also, the company introduced many “firsts,” the first single-chip SCSI interface, the first single-chip implementation of the floppy disk controller circuitry, the grandfather of modern super I/O chips and the first single-chip ATA hard disk controller.
The year 1988 was a fateful time for WDC as it purchased the production assets of Tandon, a PC hardware maker. Because of this, Western Digital was able to produce its “Centaur” line of ATA and XT attachment drives.
1990’s
The start of this decade proved to be difficult for WDC. Initially, they were doing so well with their “Caviar” series that they decided to sell their other divisions. For instance, the division making graphic cards was sold to Phillips, the floppy drive controller division went to SMC markets and their SCSI controller business went to Adaptec. However, in 1995, the technology of the company’s “Caviar” series was exceeded by emerging competition and the company fell once again into a slump.
In 1998, WDC sought the help of IBM and had access to both the technology and facilities of IBM. Soon, WDC gained the industry’s respect when it came out with their “Expert” line of drives.
2000 to the present
In 2001 WDC became the first to offer ATA hard drives with 8 MB of cache buffer. The company fast-tracked their technological edge and dotted the decade with many innovations. In 2006, WDC came up with the My Book line of mass market external hard drives, including a 1TB version in the following year.
WDC also came up with their GP range of drives which had very low power consumption, low heat dissipation and amazingly good performance.
In 2009, they released the first 2TB internal hard disk drive and in October of this year, the first 3TB internal hard disk drive was announced.
Western Digital Corporation has proven its resilience and remains as one of the forces to reckon with in the hard drive industry.
