Definition: Western Digital

(Western Digital Corporation, Lake Forest, CA) A major manufacturer of storage drives, founded as a specialty semiconductor company under the name General Digital in 1970. In the following year, its name was changed to Western Digital. In 1976, the company introduced the first floppy disk controller, and later, hard disk controllers.

In the late 1980s, Western Digital introduced a line of graphics cards for the PC and also entered the disk drive business. Since then, it has kept up the pace with continual advances in drive technology, making them ever larger and faster. In 2012, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) was acquired, and a 10TB drive geared for surveillance was introduced within two years. In 2016, the company acquired SanDisk, a leader in solid state storage.