Western Digital
More info
- Released
- 1970
- Type
- Hard drive manufacturer
A Californian chipmaker that became a hard drive giant almost by accident, by way of the controller card sitting between the disk and the PC.
The company started in 1970 as General Digital, making calculator chips until that market collapsed in the mid-seventies. Disk controllers saved it: the WD1003 became the standard in the IBM PC/AT world, and in 1986 WD worked with Compaq and Control Data on the interface that became IDE, moving the controller electronics onto the drive itself. From there, building the whole drive was a short step.
Buying Hitachi's drive unit HGST in 2012 and flash maker SanDisk in 2016 made WD one of the two giants of the market, alongside Seagate. In 2020 it emerged that the WD Red NAS line had quietly switched to SMR, turning RAID rebuilds into a crawl. In 2025 the flash business was spun off again as a separate Sandisk.