Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today reported revenue of $3.3 billion and net income of $251 million, or $1.07 per share, for its second fiscal quarter ended Jan. 1, 2016. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $374 million, or $1.60 per share. In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $3.9 billion and net income of $438 million, or $1.84 per share. Non-GAAP net income in the year-ago quarter was $539 million, or $2.26 per share.

The company generated $598 million in cash from operations during the second fiscal quarter, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $5.4 billion. On Nov. 3, 2015 the company declared a cash dividend of $0.50 per share of its common stock, which was paid on Jan. 15, 2016.

"We continue to execute well as we manage our business within an increasingly challenging global economic environment," said Steve Milligan, chief executive officer. "Despite a lower-than-expected hard drive total available market, we reported revenue and EPS within our guidance range, with non-GAAP gross margin of 28.5 percent. We also had strong free cash flow performance of $449 million. Our storage shipments for the December quarter grew to 69.1 exabytes."

In this week's TechPowerUp News - WD's whopping $19 billion acquisition of NAND flash major SanDisk and what it could mean for both brands, MSI's insanely powerful all-in-one gaming desktop; and a fully-integrated NUC desktop by Intel following three generations of the revolutionary platform. Also, an exclusive sneak peek at SilverStone's Raven RVX01 mid-tower case!

WD, a Western Digital company, today introduced the My Book Pro storage device, providing professionals and enthusiasts who must efficiently manage large amounts of digital content with up to 435 MB/s transfer rates on WD's fastest external storage solution yet.

With capacity options including 6 TB, 8 TB, 10 TB and 12 TB, the power of two 7200 RPM WD drives with Intel's Thunderbolt 2 technology and a hot-swappable hardware RAID controller, the My Book Pro device enables creative professionals and enthusiasts alike to focus on what they love doing by significantly cutting the time to transfer large videos, photos and audio files.

WD, a Western Digital company and a worldwide leader in storage solutions, and Milestone Systems, the security industry leader in video management software, announced today a partnership to deliver video surveillance solutions to businesses and consumers. The two companies will demonstrate these solutions at IFA Berlin, booth No. 103, Hall 11.2, Sept. 4 to 9; and at ASIS International, Anaheim, Calif., booth No. 3222, Sept. 28 to Oct. 1.

Milestone Arcus Surveillance software will be available on WD's My Cloud Business Series network-attached storage (NAS) systems with the new My Cloud OS 3 operating system beginning this month; and is expected to be available on other My Cloud systems, such as the My Cloud Expert Series, in the future.

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions, today announced the expansion of its award-winning WD Red Pro hard drive line with the release of 5 TB and 6 TB capacities. The WD Red Pro family is ideal for NAS (network attached storage) systems having up to 16 drive bays and serving businesses with more expansive storage needs than the standard WD Red drives.

Shipping now, WD Red Pro 5 and 6 TB drives leverage an enhanced design and 128 MB cache to deliver data transfer rates of 214 megabytes per second (MB/s). WD's NASware 3.0 features technology promoting data protection, high NAS performance and reliable integration. "WD is providing customers a full portfolio of high capacity NAS storage solutions (WD Red and WD Red Pro) for home, consumer and business NAS solutions," said Cindi Grace, senior vice president of WD storage technology group. "With the capacity expansion, there is now a path for customers to increase the storage density of their systems while knowing their data is protected with the most trusted and valued brand on the market."

WD, a Western Digital company and a world leader in hard drives, today announced the expansion of its award-winning WD Black line of performance hard drives up to 6 TB capacity. Shipping now, the 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM drive is the perfect solution for gamers and professionals in need of high-performance desktop systems and workstations.

WD Black hard drives combine 7200 RPM spin speed, 128 MB cache, dual stage actuator technology, SATA 6 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor to deliver ultimate performance in a maximum-capacity drive. The WD Black 6TB is up to 29% faster than the previous WD Black 4TB version in maximum data rate throughput and 10% faster in PCMark Vantage.

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions, today announced the new My Passport Cinema 4K Ultra HD (UHD) movie storage device, an easier and faster way to organize, store and enjoy high-definition digital movies and TV shows - including new releases in up to full 4K UHD resolution with high dynamic range (HDR) - on Samsung SUHD TVs and other VIDITY-enabled devices.

The new My Passport Cinema drive utilizes VIDITY technology to allow users to experience movies in crystal-clear, true 4K UHD picture and immersive audio. Users are able to enjoy 8.3 million pixels of stunning entertainment in minutes by simply plugging in the My Passport Cinema drive into a VIDITY-compatible UHD TV or device and purchasing preloaded1 movies from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. Once purchased on the My Passport Cinema drive, the movie can be accessed immediately online or offline on any VIDITY-enabled device such as Samsung's 2014 HU series 4K UHD TVs and 2015 JU and JS series 4K UHD and SUHD TVs. Users also can download additional titles via M-GO or other VIDITY retailers.

Helping the world harness the power of data, HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced the first enterprise-class 10TB (terabyte) hard disk drive (HDD) for next-generation active archive applications. The host-managed Ultrastar Archive Ha10 SMR HDD sets a new standard in enabling the world's densest server and storage systems with unprecedented TCO levels. This industry-defining product is the result of combining two complementary technologies - HGST's second generation, field-proven HelioSeal platform and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) - to deliver unmatched storage density and power efficiency, without compromising reliability and performance predictability. With an industry-leading 10TB capacity, the Ultrastar Archive Ha10 gives customers a time-to-market capacity advantage for archival environments and applications where data is sequentially written and randomly read, such as social media, cloud storage, online backup, life sciences as well as media and entertainment.

HGST recognizes SMR as core technology necessary in driving areal density increases. By overlapping or "shingling" the data tracks on top of each other, higher areal density can be achieved within the same physical footprint. Based on feedback from customers whose data center environments demand predictable performance and control of how data is handled, HGST has implemented a host-managed SMR solution. The sequential write behavior of host-managed SMR complements active archive workloads.

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions, today introduced the new, redesigned My Passport Ultra portable hard drives and My Passport for Mac drives. With the My Passport line now in its 7th generation, the My Passport Ultra and My Passport for Mac portable hard drives are now available in capacities up to 3 TB and in four stylish colors - Classic Black, Brilliant White, Wild Berry and Noble Blue. WD is also introducing a new optional accessory - WD Grip Pack - a soft band, available in a variety of colors, which encircles the drive, offering consumers an easy way to personalize their My Passport drives.

"With more photos being taken than ever before, it's critical to have a high capacity, reliable external storage solution that you can carry everywhere," said Tony Tate, general manager and vice president of Content Storage Solutions at WD. "The latest generation My Passport drives deliver an easier automatic back-up experience, hardware-based encryption for security and higher capacities than ever before. Consumers can keep all their content in their pockets, while expressing their personal styles with the colors and WD Grip Pack."

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that the board of directors declared a cash dividend for the quarter ending July 3, 2015, of $0.50 per share of common stock (the "cash dividend"). The cash dividend will be paid on July 15, 2015, to the company's stockholders of record as of July 3, 2015.

The amount of future dividends under the company's dividend policy, and the declaration and payment thereof, will be based upon all relevant factors, including the company's financial position, results of operations, cash flows, capital requirements and restrictions under the company's existing credit agreement, and shall be in compliance with applicable law. The board retains the power to modify, suspend or cancel the company's dividend policy in any manner and at any time as it may deem necessary or appropriate in the future.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today reported revenue of $3.5 billion and net income of $384 million, or $1.63 per share, for its third fiscal quarter ended Apr. 3, 2015. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $441 million or $1.87 per share. In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $3.7 billion and net income of $375 million, or $1.55 per share. Non-GAAP net income in the year-ago quarter was $470 million, or $1.94 per share.

The company generated $684 million in cash from operations during the third fiscal quarter, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $4.8 billion. It utilized $240 million to repurchase 2.2 million shares of common stock. On Feb. 3, the company declared a cash dividend of $0.50 per share of its common stock, which was paid on Apr. 16. "I am satisfied with our execution and results in light of current PC demand challenges that were largely driven by weak macro-economic conditions," said Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer. "We delivered a solidly profitable quarter with continued strong cash generation, improved average selling price and healthy gross margins.

WD, a Western Digital company and storage industry leader, today introduced WD Purple NV, a purpose-built line of 3.5-inch, high-capacity 4 TB and 6 TB hard drives for the greater demands of scalable network video recorder (NVR) surveillance systems.

Compared with standard WD Purple drives, the new member of the WD's surveillance video recording family of drives, WD Purple NV, is designed for larger-scale network surveillance systems utilizing higher hard drive bay counts and greater numbers of attached cameras, which demand increased storage capacity and durability. The new drives' high capacities also enable long video retention periods for analysis and reference. WD Purple NV is also designed to withstand the demands of always-on digital NVR recording environments. It offers low power consumption and many advanced performance features typically reserved for higher end surveillance storage.

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions, today introduced the My Passport X portable hard drive for gamers. When connected to Xbox One or a PC, the sleek 2 TB My Passport X drive provides much-needed storage capacity for gamers to store up to 50 extra game titles, eliminating the need to delete previously purchased games from their Xbox One or PC hard drives and removing those "storage full" warning messages while allowing players to get back to their games. In addition to added storage, gamers can use My Passport X to take saved games to use on friends' systems2 without having to download.

"Game file sizes are expanding to 36 GB per game and upwards, and are projected to continue growing," said Tony Tate, vice president and general manager of WD's Content Solutions unit. "Console gamers are able to store on average only 10 games on the 365 GB out of 500 GB that is available on the onboard hard drive. The My Passport X portable drive delivers a fast and easy way to expand capacity and enables an expanded library of games on the go."

WD, a Western Digital company and world leader in storage today introduced new datacenter hard drives that deliver to today's modern datacenter architects the lowest power consumption of any high-capacity 3.5-inch hard drive available today. The WD Re+ hard drive family is the newest component of WD's full, tiered portfolio of high-capacity datacenter storage devices. Further expanding that portfolio will be 6 terabyte (TB) capacities for WD's popular WD Re and WD Se datacenter product lines, providing customers a spectrum of capabilities, tiered to their varied demands of application intensity, power optimization and cost efficiency.

In the modern datacenter, the total cost of ownership (TCO) formula is comprised of capacity, price, power consumption and the relationships between these variables. The WD Re+ drive provides the most power efficient and high-intensity high-capacity platform available today. With power consumption a primary consideration in today's large web-scale cloud infrastructures, and the WD Re+ drive consuming only 6 watts for 6 TB, customers' TCOs increase and savings for large deployments could be millions of dollars per year.

Russian cyber-security company Kaspersky Labs exposed a breakthrough U.S. spying program, which taps into one of the most widely proliferated PC components - hard drives. With the last 5 years seeing the number of hard drive manufacturing nations reduce from three (Korean Samsung, Japanese Hitachi and Toshiba, and American Seagate and WD) to one (American Seagate or WD), swallowing-up or partnering with Japanese and Korean businesses as US-based subsidiaries or spin-offs such as HGST, a shadow of suspicion has been cast on Seagate and WD.

According to Kaspersky, American cyber-surveillance agency, the NSA, is taking advantage of the centralization of hard-drive manufacturing to the US, by making WD and Seagate embed its spying back-doors straight into the hard-drive firmware, which lets the agency directly access raw data, agnostic of partition method (low-level format), file-system (high-level format), operating system, or even user access-level. Kaspersky says it found PCs in 30 countries with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today reported revenue of $3.9 billion and net income of $460 million, or $1.93 per share, for its second fiscal quarter ended Jan. 2, 2015. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $539 million or $2.26 per share. In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $4.0 billion and net income of $430 million, or $1.77 per share. Non-GAAP net income in the year-ago quarter was $532 million, or $2.19 per share.

The company generated $243 million in cash from operations during the December quarter, net of the Seagate arbitration award payment of $773 million, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $4.9 billion. During the December quarter, the company utilized $309 million to repurchase 3.2 million shares of common stock. On Nov. 4, the company declared a $0.40 per common-share dividend, which was paid on Jan. 15.

WD, a Western Digital company and world leader in storage solutions, will demonstrate the world's fastest 4 TB hybrid drive at the SATA-IO booth (#205) at Storage Visions 2015, January 4 to 5 in Las Vegas, NV. WD's prototype drive utilizes the SATA Express PCI-e interface, 4 TB 3.5-inch hybrid hard drive, and up to 128 GB solid state drive to deliver compelling performance and GB-per-dollar solutions for desktop and gaming applications.

The two WD SATA Express interface demonstrations at Storage Visions 2015 will include commercially available motherboards from WD partners ASRock and Gigabyte. These systems will demonstrate cabled SATA Express PCI-e interconnect flexibility and configuration options for single-volume caching and RAID.

WD, a Western Digital company and storage industry leader, today announced the expansion of its award-winning WD Purple line of 3.5-inch hard drives for video surveillance applications, with the release of the 6 TB capacity. Video surveillance is a highly data-rich application within the "Internet of Things (IoT)" ecosystem. WD Purple hard drives excel in new and existing home and small business security system environments with up to eight hard drives and up to 32 high-definition (HD) video cameras. Available today, WD Purple hard drives are being offered in capacities from 1 TB up to 6 TB.

"Video surveillance has long been a pioneering Internet-of-Things application. Driven by machine-to-machine interaction between high-resolution, high-bit-rate video cameras and high-capacity surveillance video recorders, IoT applications bring access and big data analytics to improve user's security," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager of WD's Storage Technology group. "WD Purple 6 TB drives enable innovation in this fast growing market."

WD, a Western Digital company and world leader in storage solutions, is expanding its business-class NAS portfolio with the WD Sentinel DX4200 storage server. The WD Sentinel DX4200 is a complete solution using Windows Storage Server, designed to meet the demands of today's small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) by combining Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 workgroup operating system and the Intel Atom C2338 Dual Core CPU.

With up to 16 TB of capacity, the WD Sentinel DX4200 enables small businesses to expand their office storage by upgrading the drives as the demands of their businesses grow. The WD Sentinel DX4200 is an ideal backup solution and provides SMBs the advantages of on-premise centralized storage.

WD, a Western Digital company and world leader in storage deployed for modern datacenters, today announced its innovative WD Ae line of hard drives designed for the unique operating characteristics of the emerging archive tier within web-scale datacenters. Built on a platform to achieve optimal total cost of ownership (TCO), WD Ae hard drives utilize the lowest possible power consumption and a Progressive Capacity model to enable a new tier of storage for large-scale cloud infrastructures.

"Modern datacenter customers came to us with a need for an HDD solution designed specifically for ever-expanding cold-data repositories," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager, storage technology, WD. "Now in our third generation with over 700 petabytes deployed, WD is bringing the WD Ae drive to the broader market, representing another vital component of WD's capacity storage portfolio, which delivers features and product attributes optimized for the rapidly evolving storage market."

Japanese peripherals maker I-O Data rolled out the HDJA-UTW line of external hard drives featuring the NAS-grade WD Red drives from Western Digital. Measuring 45 mm x 216 mm x 155 mm (WxDxH), the drives feature a monolithic matte black design. Capacities include 1 TB (HDJA-UT1.0W), 2 TB (HDJA-UT2.0W), 3 TB (HDJA-UT3.0W), and 4 TB (HDJA-UT4.0W). The drives feature USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface, and an internal power supply that draws power from AC (no bulky external power bricks). A 40 mm fan spools up only when the drive needs it. When it doesn't, a heatsink making contact with the internal drive keeps it passively cool.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of its My Passport line of portable external hard drives, WD, a Western Digital company, is introducing a sleek new design for the world's most popular external hard drive lines. More than 60 million My Passport drives have been sold in the past 10 years, providing approximately 42,000 petabytes of content protection for consumers worldwide.

The My Passport Ultra - Metal Edition drive and My Passport Ultra - Anniversary Edition drive represent a decade of refinement for WD's enduring portable drive line. They feature elegant metal exteriors, up to 2 TB capacities in smaller enclosures, content protection, including backup, and cloud integration for anywhere access to personal content.

QNAP Systems, Inc. announced today that Turbo NAS products now support the new WD Red 5/6 TB NAS hard drives and WD Red Pro NAS hard drives. Specifically designed for NAS applications and featuring exclusive NASware 3.0 technology, the new WD Red and WD Red Pro hard drives provide enhanced reliability and performance for NAS applications.

The new WD Red 5/6 TB NAS hard drives are designed for NAS systems with up to 8 drive bays and can easily meet the growing data storage demands of SOHO and home users. The WD Red Pro NAS hard drives are designed to provide affordable, robust and highly-reliable hard drives for medium-to-large-scale business NAS systems with 8-16 drive bays.

PROMISE Technology Inc., a global leader in the storage industry that develops solutions for the cloud/IT, rich media and video surveillance markets, announced today that its Vess storage series supports the new WD Red PRO line of SATA hard drives.

The WD Red PRO line is specifically designed for NAS applications and features NASware 3.0 in addition to a unique vibration sensor design which enables the hard drives to be paired with for example the Vess R2000 to provide an optimized NAS environment experience with impressive reliability for end-users and owners of small and medium-sized business.

ASUSTOR Inc., a leading innovator and provider of network storage solutions, announced today that it has verified compatibility of 5 new WD hard drives models with ASUSTOR NAS devices. These new hard drives consist of 3 new WD Red Pro models (WD4001FFSX, WD3001FFSX, WD2001FFSX) for SMB and 2 high capacities WD Red models are available in 6 TB and 5 TB models (WD60EFRX, WD50EFRX) for home and SOHO markets. ASUSTOR NAS users will now enjoy more flexibility and choice when selecting suitable hard drives for enterprise or personal cloud storage applications.

The ASUSTOR NAS product line consists of 2, 4, 6 and 8-bay tower models along with 4, 9 and 12-bay rackmount models. All devices are powered by high-performance Intel Atom dual-core processors which are suitable for personal, home and business use. Users are free to select a disk capacity suited to their storage needs to create a dedicated cloud storage server that centralizes their data and backups.