WD® Delivers World's Thinnest 1 TB Hard Drive

IRVINE, Calif. and TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 3, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- WD^®, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company, today announced COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2013 (booth L0810) it is shipping the world's thinnest 1 TB hard drive with its new 2.5-inch WD Blue™ 7 mm hard drive. Offering OEMs, channel integrators and consumers a unique storage solution for thin and light systems, slimmer notebooks, as well as compatibility with the industry-standard 9.5 mm drive slots of mainstream notebooks, the WD Blue hard drive family, in capacities from 320 GB to 1 TB in the 7 mm height, now provides a singular option of thin design and high capacity storage.

"Users with large portfolios of content no longer need an Ultrabook or upgrading to a thin and light notebook," said Matt Rutledge, Vice President and General Manager for client storage products at WD. "This most compact 1TB hard drive to-date offers manufacturers of systems an upsell path for their customers who will now be able to choose systems offering both sleek design and high capacity.

"Intel is introducing its fourth-generation Intel Core processor family (codenamed Haswell) to deliver faster and more efficient performance to both desktop and notebook platforms, with significant gains benefitting portable systems" said Roger Bradford, Capabilities Marketing Manager at Intel. "The release of the WD Blue 7 mm hard drives offers a new level of storage capacity that further enriches the computing experience for users of Ultrabooks, All-in-Ones and other thin and light PCs."

"With the release of WD's 1 TB capacity in a 7 mm drive height, Acer customers now have the best of both options and no longer have to choose between the lightness of thin, sleekly designed systems or those with high capacity storage," said Tiffany Huang, BG President, PC Global Operations at Acer Incorporated.

"As ASUS develops new super-slim solutions, reliable storage options such as the WD Blue 7 mm 1 TB hard drive provide us with an ideal capacity to offer our customers," said S.Y. Shian, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of NB Business Unit at Asus. "WD has eliminated the capacity limits heretofore endured by thin and light personal computers while keeping the reliability and data-protection of a traditional hard drive."

Features of the WD Blue 7 mm hard drives include:

• Shock Tolerance – WD's ShockGuard™ technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks.
• Cool and quiet - WD's exclusive WhisperDrive™ technology enables quiet performance.
• StableTrac™ – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to compensate for system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations which enables consistently higher performance.
• Dual Stage Actuators – Leveraged from enterprise-class drives, dual stage actuators utilize two actuators to improve positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.
• Reliable – WD's SecurePark™ parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down, and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long term reliability due to less head wear, and improved non-operational shock tolerance.
• Compatibility Tested - WD performs tests on hundreds of systems and a multitude of platforms in its FIT Lab™ and Mobile Compatibility Lab to give customers confidence that drives will work in specific systems.

Price and Availability

Shipping now through select distributors and resellers, the new 1 TB WD Blue 7 mm 2.5-inch mobile hard drive is covered by a two-year limited warranty. MSRP for the 1 TB, model#: (WD10SPCXX) is $139.00 USD. Additional information about WD Blue mobile hard drives and limited warranty terms may be found on the company website at http://www.wd.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=800.

About WD

WD, a Western Digital company, is a long-time innovator and storage industry leader. As a storage technology pacesetter, the company produces reliable, high-performance hard disk drives and solid state drives. These drives are deployed by OEMs and integrators in desktop and mobile computers, enterprise computing systems, embedded systems and consumer electronics applications, as well as by the company in providing its own storage products. WD's leading storage devices and systems, networking products, media players and software solutions empower people around the world to easily save, store, protect, share and experience their content on multiple devices. WD was established in 1970 and is headquartered in Irvine, California. For more information, please visit the company's website at www.wd.com.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC), Irvine, Calif., is a global provider of products and services that empower people to create, manage, experience and preserve digital content. Its companies design and manufacture storage devices, networking equipment and home entertainment products under the WD, HGST and G-Technology brands. Visit the Investor section of the company's website (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.

Western Digital, WD, the WD logo are registered trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries; WD Blue, ShockGuard, SecurePark, StableTrac, WhisperDrive FIT Lab are trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Ultrabook is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other marks may be mentioned herein that belong to other companies. As used for storage capacity one gigabyte (GB) = 1 billion bytes, one terabyte (TB) = 1 trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. See support.wdc.com for limited warranty terms and conditions. 

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SOURCE WD