Western Digital 2007 Annual Report Download - page 14

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Mobile Hard Drive Products
Our hard drives used in mobile products typically include 2.5-inch form factor drives for notebook computers.
Although the desktop market accounts for a majority of hard drive sales, unit shipments of hard drives for notebook
computers represent a growing share of the total. We entered the 2.5-inch mobile market in September 2004. We are now
shipping our fourth generation of the WD Scorpio»product family, offering up to 250 GB of capacity. Our product
expansion has enabled us to provide customers with a full-line of 2.5-inch mobile drives and helped us enhance our
market position in this fast-growing market.
Enterprise Hard Drive Products
We offer multiple product lines to address enterprise market needs, including:
• the WD Raptor», which is a 10,000 RPM enterprise-class drive with the SATA interface for enterprise
applications requiring high performance and high reliability; and
• the WD Raid Edition (“RE”), which is a 7,200 RPM drive with capacities ranging from 160 GB to 750 GB. The
WD RE includes both SATA and EIDE interfaces and has enhanced reliability features and ratings when
contrasted to our desktop products.
Both WD Raptor»and WD RE drives may be used in, but are not limited to, applications such as databases,
e-commerce and super computing in life science, oil and gas and similar industries, business records management, e-mail,
file serving, web serving, near-line storage, medical records, engineering data management, video broadcasting and video
security.
Consumer Electronics Products
We offer a line of hard drives under the WD AV brand that are designed for use in products such as DVRs, STBs,
karaoke systems, multi-function printers, and gaming systems. WD AV drives deliver the characteristics CE manu-
facturers seek most, which are quiet operation, low temperature, low power consumption specifications, high reliability
and optimized streaming capabilities.
Branded Products
We sell a broad line of WD-branded hard drive-based storage appliances, which are internal drives embedded into
PC peripheral-style enclosures that have USB 2.0, external SATA, FireWire
TM
and Ethernet network connections and
include software that assists customers with back up, remote access and management of digital content. We sell these
branded storage appliances, as well as related adapters, through retail store fronts, online stores and distributors. These
include:
• the 3.5-inch hard drive-based My Book
TM
family of storage appliances, which are designed to reside on desktops
as PC peripherals and simplify storage for mainstream consumers, and offer from 80 GB to 2 TB of capacity;
• The 3.5-inch My DVR Expander
TM
storage appliance, which adds recording time to STBs with DVR capability;
• the 2.5-inch hard drive-based WD Passport»Portable series of USB 2.0 storage devices, which, in a form
measuring approximately 5.0 inches by 3.0 inches by 0.6 inches and weighing less than one-quarter of a pound,
offer from 40 GB to 250 GB of portable storage capacity; and
• 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch internal hard drives packaged with PC installation kits under the WD brand for retail store
sales.
Research and Development
We devote substantial resources to development of new products and improvement of existing products. We focus
our engineering efforts on coordinating our product design and manufacturing processes to bring our products to market
in a cost-effective and timely manner. Research and development expenses totaled $306 million, $297 million and
$240 million in 2007, 2006 and 2005, respectively.
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