Western Digital 2012 Annual Report Download - page 13

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Branded Products
External storage devices supplement the storage space of PC systems for home and small office networks. They
are ideally suited to back up data on internal drives because of their portability and security features. We believe hard
drive shipments into the branded products market increased 5% in calendar 2011 from calendar 2010.
Media players connect to a user’s television or home theater system and play digital movies, music and photos
from an integrated hard drive, Universal Serial Bus (“USB”) mass storage devices or content services accessed over the
Internet. There is a growing need for consumers to play and view their personal stored digital content and premium
content from the Internet on their television and home theater system consistent with the growing trend to digitize
rich content and data.
Home networking is an emerging market in the branded products space as consumers seek to address overload
problems resulting from the proliferation of devices simultaneously using home networks.
Other Market Opportunities
We regularly review opportunities to apply our knowledge of data storage technology to markets that we do not
currently serve. Based on our significant investments, we believe we have the technology building blocks to increase
our overall market penetration and be a full-line data storage solutions supplier. Consistent with our measured and
deliberate approach to new market entries in the recent past, our approach to additional new markets will be based on
a careful assessment of the risks, rewards, requirements and profit potential of such actions.
Products
We offer a broad line of storage devices. Our hard drives currently include 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors,
capacities ranging from 30 gigabytes (“GB”) to 4 terabytes (“TB”), nominal rotation speeds up to 15,000 revolutions
per minute (“RPM”), and interfaces such as Advanced Technology Attachment (“ATA”) and Serial Attached SCSI
(Small Computer System Interface) (“SAS”). In addition, we offer a family of hard drives specifically designed to con-
sume substantially less power than standard drives, utilizing our WD GreenPower Technologytm. Our solid-state
drives currently include 2.5-inch, mSATA, MO-297 and CompactFlash form factors, capacities ranging from 128 MB
to 400 GB, and interfaces such as SAS, Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (“SATA”) and Parallel Advanced
Technology Attachment (“PATA”). We also participate in the mobile computing market of smart phones and tablets
with standalone Western Digital software applications such as WD Photos and WD2go for iOS, Android and Win-
dows Phone platforms.
Enterprise Storage Products. Enterprise storage products consist of hard drives for performance enterprise and
capacity enterprise, as well as solid-state drives for embedded applications. Our hard drive enterprise unit shipments
were 16 million, 10 million and 9 million for 2012, 2011 and 2010, respectively. Our enterprise storage products
include:
‰HGST Ultrastar®capacity drives provide enterprise class reliability at the lowest cost per GB and are primarily
for use in data storage systems, in tiered storage models and where data must be stored reliably for years and
delivered across enterprise;
‰HGST Ultrastar®performance drives are optimized for performance applications. Ultrastar®large form factor
drives provide high performance, high capacity storage, primarily for data storage systems. Ultrastar®small
form factor drives provide a range of capacity and performance levels primarily for use in enterprise servers,
supporting high volume on-line transactions, data analysis and other enterprise applications. The Ultrastar®
SSD400S is designed for the ultimate performance storage tier, with up to 400 GB of high performance, high
endurance SLC NAND Flash;
‰WD®RE family of hard drives is designed for capacity storage enterprise applications requiring high perform-
ance and high reliability;
‰WD SiliconDrive®family of solid-state drives features fast read/write speeds in high capacities and is designed
for embedded system OEM applications that require high performance and reliability with a long product life;
and
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