WD Maximizes Hard Drives

LAKE FOREST, Calif. -- WD(R) (NYSE: WDC)announced today that it is now shipping in volume its WD Caviar(R) SE16 640 GB3.5-inch hard drives based on 320 GB-per-platter technology -- a platform thatit has been shipping since January 2008 and is serving as the foundation of allof the company's 3.5-inch drive families.

Ideal for data-intensive applications, high-performance computing and multimediasystems, the WD Caviar SE16 640 GB drives deliver high performance with theirextreme areal density, 3 Gb/s transfer rate, and Native Command Queuing (NCQ).Its two-platter design promotes cool, quiet operation in a high-capacity drive.

"The 640 GB capacity point will be an important one for our desktop customers,and WD is leading high-volume shipments to the channel and OEM customers," saidDon Bennett, general manager and vice president of WD's desktop business unit."Two-platter hard drives have always been the perfect balance of value, capacityand performance for many of our customers. Today's common two-platter drives arelimited to 500 GB, but we are expanding capacity by 28 percent on the samedesign with WD's leading technology heads and disks."

Western Digital Corp.