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Western Digital history
Western Digital company history timeline
Western Digital was founded on April 23, 1970, by Alvin B. Phillips, a Motorola employee, as General Digital, initially a manufacturer of MOS test equipment.
In 1970, Western Digital began producing special semiconductors in its incarnation as Emerson Electric Company of St Louis.
Around July 1971, it adopted its current name and soon introduced its first product, the WD1402A UART.
In 1973, Western Digital established its Malaysian plant, initially to manufacture semiconductors.
Alvin B. Phillips was the founder and president of Western Digital from its inception until 1976.
In 1976, Western Digital acquired the patent for the first disk array sub-system, the backbone of the modern storage environment.
In 1976, Western Digital also entered the data storage industry with its first line of floppy disc controllers, the FD1771.
Chuck Missler joined Western Digital as chairman and chief executive in June 1977, and became the largest shareholder of Western Digital.
But in 1983, Western Digital engineers produced a wire-wrapped prototype of a hard-drive controller for IBM's PC/AT in only 14 days.
Dell Inc. history, profile and history video Michael Dell founded the company in 1984 from his Texas dorm room, starting a new computer business under the name of PC's Limited.
Almost 90 percent of Western Digital's income was coming from storage controller products by 1985.
In 1985, the company produced the first ESDI, or Enhanced Small Device Interface controller board, enabling PCs to run faster and store more.
In 1988, Western Digital became a Fortune 500 company.
In 1988, Eli Harari and his SanDisk colleagues introduced “System Flash”, a revolutionary storage medium that will replace HDDs in portable, battery-operated devices.
At IBM, his Rochester, Minnesota, storage products team had won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1990.
In 1990, Western Digital partnered with SanDisk (then SunDisk) to create the first commercial flash SSD.
In 1992, SanDisk collaborated with Kodak and Canon to standardize camera card slots.
In 1993, he was first elected director, then chairman, and then chief executive officer of the company.
Western Digital fabricated the first two-platter, 3.5-inch, 340-megabyte drive in 1993.
In 1994, Western Digital was proud to announce that it had become the first United States-headquartered, multinational company to be awarded ISO 9001 status by the International Standards Organization.
In 1994, Western Digital began producing hard drives at its Malaysian factory, employing 13,000 people.
Fortune magazine, however, found in 1997 that among its readers, Western Digital was more admired than either Quantum or Seagate in the computer peripherals sector, citing management and investment value as several of the criteria.
While Western Digital stock went as high as 54 and split at 44 in 1997, it had yet to regain its original value a year later, going as low as 14 . Funding was tight, and Western Digital raised money the old-fashioned way: they sold $400 million of zero coupon convertible subordinated debentures.
IBM's research scientists announced that they had fit "more than 11.6 billion bits of data in one square inch on the surface of a rotating magnetic disk," according to a February 1998 issue of the New York Times.
A class action suit was announced against Western Digital on February 2, 1998, alleging that some key insiders had manipulated financial numbers to their benefit, while the average stockholder took a loss.
Western Digital's struggle to keep up, technology-wise, led industry experts to speculate that the company was perfect for purchase in 1998.
In mid-1998, the company entered into a special partnership agreement whereby IBM would share its areal-density giant magnetoresistive (GMR) heads with Western Digital, and IBM in turn would have a foothold in the PC peripherals market.
In 1999, Western Digital partnered with TiVo to develop a 500MB external hard drive that could hold 140 hours of HD Content.
The result was the Expert line of drives, introduced in early 1999.
In 2000, the first USB flash drives were introduced to the public.
In October 2001, Western Digital restated its prior year results to reflect the adoption of SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin No.101 and the reclassification of Connex and SANavigator results as discontinued operations.
In 2001, Western Digital became the first manufacturer to offer mainstream ATA hard disk drives with 8 MiB of disk buffer.
In 2003, Western Digital acquired most of the assets of bankrupt one-time market leading magnetic hard drive read-write head developer Read-Rite Corporation.
In 2004, SanDisk and Motorola jointly introduced the TransFlash removable card for mobile phones, which was later renamed microSD.
In 2006, Western Digital introduced its My Book line of mass market external hard drives that feature a compact book-like design.
On October 7, 2007, Western Digital released several editions of a single 1 TB hard drive, the largest in its My Book line.
In 2007, Western Digital acquired magnetic media maker Komag.
In 2007, Western Digital announced the WD GP drive touting rotational speed "between 7200 and 5400 rpm", which is technically correct while also being misleading; the drive spins at 5405 rpm, and the Green Power spin speed is not variable.
On September 12, 2008, Western Digital shipped a 500 GB 2.5-inch (64 mm) notebook hard drive which is part of their Scorpio Blue series of notebook hard drives.
On January 27, 2009, Western Digital shipped the first 2 TB internal hard disk drive.
On March 30, 2009, they entered the solid-state drive market with the acquisition of Siliconsystems, Inc.
In March 2011, Western Digital agreed to acquire the storage unit of Hitachi, HGST, for about $4.3 billion of which $3.5 billion was paid in cash and the rest with 25 million shares of Western Digital.
In March 2012, Western Digital completed the acquisition of HGST and became the largest traditional hard drive manufacturer in the world.
In December 2013, Western Digital stopped manufacturing parallel ATA hard disk drives for laptops (2.5-inch form factor) and desktop PCs (3.5-inch form factor). Until that time, they were last hard disk manufacturer to produce PATA hard disk drives.
In 2016, Western Digital acquired SanDisk for $16 billion.
In 2016, HGST closed its Malaysian plant.
In August 2017, Western Digital bought cloud storage provider Upthere, with the intention to continue building out the service.
In September 2017, Western Digital acquired Tegile Systems, maker of flash memory storage arrays.
In October 2017, Western Digital shipped the world's first 14 TB HDD, the helium-filled HGST Ultrastar Hs14.
In December 2017, Western Digital reached an agreement with Toshiba about the sale of the jointly owned NAND production facility in Japan.
In the summer of 2017, Western Digital licensed the Fusion-io/SanDisk ION Accelerator software to One Stop Systems.
In May 2018, Toshiba reached an agreement with the Bain consortium about the sale of that chip unit.
In July 2018, Western Digital announced their plan to close their hard disk production facility in Kuala Lumpur to shift the company towards flash drive production, leaving the company with just two HDD production facilities in Thailand.
In 2018, our SanDisk brand revealed a prototype of their new innovation, the world's smallest USB flash drive with an impressive capacity to store 1TB.
Fast-forward to 2018 and an average of 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute with more than 1 billion hours of video consumed every day.
The HGST brand was phased out in 2018, and since then, all HGST-branded products are just branded Western Digital.
The company ranked 158th on the 2018 Fortune 500 of the largest United States corporations by revenue.
In June 2019, Kioxia experienced a power cut at one of its factories in Yokkaichi, Japan, resulting in the loss of at least 6 exabytes of flash memory, with some sources estimating the loss as high as 15 exabytes.
Western Digital rebranded Tegile as IntelliFlash and sold it to DataDirect Networks in September 2019.
In 2019, Western Digital partnered with Google, lowRISC and others to launch OpenTitan, the first open-source silicon root of trust (RoT) chips project.
In August 2021, Western Digital and Japanese memory-chip supplier Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) began working out the details of a merger to be finalized in September 2021.
In February 2022, Western Digital and Kioxia reported that contamination issues have affected the output of their flash memory joint-production factories, with WD admitting that at least 6.5 exabytes of memory output being affected.
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Western Digital competitors
| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate Technology | 1979 | $6.6B | 40,000 | 66 |
| Intel | 1968 | $53.1B | 121,100 | 554 |
| Broadcom | 1991 | $8.4B | 15,000 | 412 |
| Texas Instruments | 1930 | $15.6B | 29,888 | 242 |
| Micron Technology | 1978 | $30.8B | 49,000 | 623 |
| Collins Aerospace | 2018 | $2.4B | 50,000 | - |
| L3Harris | 1895 | $17.8B | 17,000 | 2,724 |
| Northrop Grumman | 1939 | $41.0B | 97,000 | 2,819 |
| Lockheed Martin | 1995 | $71.0B | 115,000 | 5,040 |
| Rockwell Automation | 1903 | $8.3B | 24,500 | 292 |
Western Digital history FAQs
Zippia gives an in-depth look into the details of Western Digital, including salaries, political affiliations, employee data, and more, in order to inform job seekers about Western Digital. The employee data is based on information from people who have self-reported their past or current employments at Western Digital. The data on this page is also based on data sources collected from public and open data sources on the Internet and other locations, as well as proprietary data we licensed from other companies. Sources of data may include, but are not limited to, the BLS, company filings, estimates based on those filings, H1B filings, and other public and private datasets. While we have made attempts to ensure that the information displayed are correct, Zippia is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of this information. None of the information on this page has been provided or approved by Western Digital. The data presented on this page does not represent the view of Western Digital and its employees or that of Zippia.
Western Digital may also be known as or be related to Wd, A Western Digital Company, Western Digital, Western Digital Corporation, Western Digital Japan Ltd. and western digital fremont, llc.