Synology Inc. today announced compatibility results for new WD Red and WD Red Pro 3.5-inch NAS hard drives, including WD60EFRX (6 TB), WD50EFRX (5 TB), WD4001FFSX (4 TB), WD3001FFSX (3 TB), WD2001FFSX (2 TB). After comprehensive stress testing, Synology has confirmed the above hard drives to be compatible with selected DiskStations and RackStations from x15, x14, x13, x12, x11, x10 series.

"Synology is excited for the launch of WD Red 6 TB and WD Red Pro hard drives, allowing for more choices of hard drives to fit various requirements. Together with WD Red drives, Synology DiskStation and RackStation provide users with reliable solutions that grow with their storage demands, and efficiently centralize and share their data," said Rosiel Lee, senior sales and marketing manager. WD Red and Red Pro hard drives are designed specifically for NAS servers, aiming to deliver fine-tuned power and performance for home and business users alike. In addition to larger storage capacity, NASware 3.0 technology supports up to 8 bays for WD Red drives and 16 bays for WD Red Pro drives, as well as enhanced reliability, system performance, and easier integration.

HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), today announced its next-generation of Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS solid-state drives (SSDs) with capacities up to 1.6TB. Building upon its award-winning first generation 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, the new Ultrastar SSD800MH.B, Ultrastar SSD1600MM and Ultrastar SSD1600MR are the ideal building blocks for server and storage systems running today's performance-sensitive enterprise applications.

The Ultrastar SAS SSDs create new price/performance points by combining HGST's deep enterprise storage expertise developed over the last 50 years, HGST's customer-proven 12Gb/s SAS technology and Intel's 20 nanometer (nm) high endurance enterprise-grade MLC NAND memory. As a result, HGST's Ultrastar SAS SSDs excel in key total cost of ownership (TCO) metrics for enterprise applications, including transactions/$ and transactions/watt.

Western Digital rolled out a 12 TB variant of its My Book Duo external drive, which debuted last month in capacities originally up to 8 TB. The new 12 TB model comes with a pair of 6 TB WD Red hard drives pre-installed, which you can either use as independent volumes, or stripe in RAID 0 for transfer rates as high as 290 MB/s. Other RAID modes supported include RAID 1 and JBOD. The drive plugs into the host over a single USB 3.0 connection. It features an additional two USB 3.0 downstream ports, so you can plug in additional drives.

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions, today announced the expansion of its award-winning WD Red line of SATA hard drives for home and small office NAS (network attached storage) systems with the release of a 5 TB and first-to-market 6 TB capacity for NAS-specific storage and the introduction of WD Red Pro hard drives that address the medium to large business NAS market. Compatibility-tested with top NAS system manufacturers and optimized for power and performance, WD Red 3.5-inch hard drives are now shipping in 1 TB to 6 TB capacities; and the new WD Red Pro 3.5-inch hard drives are available in 2 TB to 4 TB capacities.

"With the expansion and evolution of the WD Red family, WD once again is providing its loyal customers with increased capacity up to 6 TB; improved bay count support with up to 8 bays; increased product breadth with WD Red Pro; and more features with the latest generation of NASware technology," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager, WD Storage Technology. "WD continues to listen to its customers and bring exciting innovation to the category they helped to create."

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) announced today the appointment of Paula A. Price to its board of directors. Ms. Price, 52, is currently senior lecturer at Harvard Business School in the Accounting and Management Unit. She was executive vice president and chief financial officer of Ahold USA until January 2014. Ms. Price will be subject to re-appointment at the next Western Digital annual meeting of shareholders. Ms. Price has also been appointed to serve on the board's Audit Committee.

"I am very pleased to welcome Paula to the Western Digital board of directors," said Tom Pardun, chairman of the board. "Paula is an accomplished finance executive with broad general management and strategic experience in a distinguished career. Her perspective and judgment will allow for continued strong financial governance on our board." With this appointment, Western Digital's board now comprises 13 directors, 12 of whom are external and independent. Ms. Price also serves on the boards of directors for Accenture, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, and on the board of overseers for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions for the connected life, today introduced My Book Duo, the newest member of its award-winning line of desktop storage solutions for home and office. Utilizing two drives, hardware-level RAID and USB 3.0, My Book Duo delivers massive capacity and file transfer speeds not available on single-drive solutions. Available in 4 TB, 6 TB and 8 TB capacities, My Book Duo also comes with software that creates secure local, cloud and system-level backups for complete data protection.

"From creative pros and expert consumers to everyday content creators - people with large amounts of data will find My Book Duo the fast and reliable way to offload content from their computers, organize it in a single location and protect it with backups, passwords and encryption," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president of content solutions and worldwide sales at WD. "My Book Duo offers super-fast transfer speeds, massive capacity and integrated WD Red drives to provide the ultimate desktop storage solution for all your digital libraries."

WD, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company, and world leader in storage solutions, will be demonstrating the first PCI Express hard drives at Computex Taipei, June 3-4, 2014. Enabled with key technology partners, WD's prototype introduces the new SATA Express interface, a form of PCI Express technology, which is offered on recently launched Intel series-9 chipset motherboard platforms. The SATA Express interface provides a roadmap for faster speeds, lower power consumption and increased flexibility for future OEM designs.

The road to the world's first demonstration of SATA Express has been in development for almost 3 years. In 2011, SATA-IO, the group responsible for charting the future of SATA, announced that it was developing a new specification that would fundamentally change the core technology behind SATA by melding it with the more advanced PCI Express computer interface. In 2013, the SATA Express specification was announced; and just one year later, WD and selected partners have realized a prototype of what is expected to be the next generation of storage technology.

WD, a Western Digital company and storage industry leader, today announced the availability of WD Purple, a purpose-built line of 3.5-inch, high-capacity hard drives for surveillance applications. Designed specifically for video surveillance units, WD Purple hard drives excel in new and existing home and small business security environments with up to eight hard drives and up to 32 high-definition (HD) video cameras. Shipping today, WD Purple hard drives are available in capacities from 1 TB up to 4 TB.

"By expanding our 'Power of Choice' product portfolio with WD Purple, we make it simple for our VARs, integrators and consumers to select the right drive engineered for their application and validated with our industry leading surveillance partners," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager of WD's Storage Technology group. "WD optimized the WD Purple line of hard drives for surveillance applications to improve high-definition video playback, and operate in 24x7 workloads of surveillance environments."

WD, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company and a world leader in digital storage solutions, today announced version 10.2 of WD Arkeia network backup software, featuring significant scalability improvements to the WD Arkeia patented Progressive Deduplication technology. WD Arkeia network backup software is a fast, easy-to-use, and affordable solution for small and medium sized businesses that ensures critical business data is backed up on both the local network and in the cloud.

"Backup solutions for businesses are going through a dramatic shift in technology," said Bill Evans, general manager of WD's business storage solutions group. "Advances in data deduplication, hard drive capacity, and wide-area network speeds allow companies to dispense with the error-prone process of trucking nightly backup tapes offsite. WD Arkeia 10.2 extends WD's hybrid cloud backup solution that offers the speed of LAN backups and the security of cloud storage. 'Seed and feed' for overnight transport of large backup sets delivers the flexibility of rapid data recovery when needed."

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that the board of directors declared a cash dividend for the quarter ending Mar. 28, 2014, of $0.30 per share of common stock (the "cash dividend"). The cash dividend will be paid on Apr. 15, 2014 to the company's stockholders of record as of Mar. 28, 2014.

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 is expected to end shipments of parallel-ATA (PATA or legacy ATA) hard drives from December 29, 2013. The company maintained a small lineup of PATA hard drives in its product stack, to cater to people with older laptops looking for hard drive upgrades, and whoever else may be using the old standard that was blasted into obsolescence exactly a decade ago, with the introduction of SATA and AHCI. Product discontinuation notifications (PDNs) for the company's last Caviar PATA hard drives, bearing model numbers WD800AAJB (80 GB), WD1600AAJB (160 GB), WD2500AAJB (250 GB), WD3200AAJB (320 GB), WD4000AAJB (400 GB), and WD5000AAJB (500 GB) were issued this may, soliciting the last orders from OEMs and distributors. The last of those orders will be fulfilled by the 29th, when the drives will enter end-of-life (EOL) state. The company will only honor active warranties from then on.

WD, a Western Digital company and world leader in digital storage solutions, and Baidu, China's largest search engine, have agreed to integrate Baidu Yun public cloud storage services with WD's personal cloud and external storage platforms to provide Chinese consumers a compelling, hybrid digital storage solution.

WD's My Cloud personal cloud drives, available now in China in capacities of 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB, enable consumers to organize, centralize and secure the digital content from all of their computers and mobile devices and access those files from any device and from anywhere in the world. WD's My Cloud EX4 high-performance four-bay network attached storage (NAS) solution, available now in China in 0 TB, 8 TB, 12 TB or 16 TB capacities, provides creative professionals, prosumers and workgroups a reliable way to save, share, back up, stream and manage massive amounts of digital data. The Baidu Yun service is a leading public cloud storage service provider with more than 100 million users. Consumers and businesses store content on Baidu Yun for easy access and sharing from any computer or mobile device.

WD, a Western Digital company and storage industry leader, today announced the release of the WD Black2 dual drive, a unique storage innovation that fuses a 2.5-inch 120 GB solid state drive (SSD) with a 1 TB hard disk drive (HDD) to offer a powerful dual drive solution. Perfect for consumers and service providers looking to upgrade notebooks, small form factor desktops, and single-slot and all-in-one (AIO) systems with both SSD level performance and HDD capacity, the WD Black2 dual drive connects through a single cable and fits into a conventional 9.5 mm slot.

"Our customers told us they like our Solid State Hybrid Drive technology, but our tech savvy users asked for more control of where they store their data," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of WD's Storage Technology business unit. "The WD Black2 dual drives empower our customers to enjoy SSD performance and access high capacity storage in a no-compromise package. The WD Black2 dual drive is a direct result of our interaction with our customer base through WD Labs initiatives. WD devised its beta labs program to provide an exclusive testing arena for key customers and technology influencers of existing and emerging WD storage products."

WD, a Western Digital company, today introduced the My Passport Air 1 TB, the only 1 TB portable hard drive for Mac users available in a stylishly thin all-aluminum enclosure. With 1 TB of storage capacity, customers will be able to take all their digital photos, music, video, on the go, and still have enough room to save all the new content they capture along the way. The ultra-slim design of My Passport Air complements the popular MacBook and MacBook Air form factors with an all-aluminium exterior to give enhanced protection to the drive and its contents. Seamless, out-of-the-box operation with Mac computers, including Time Machine, provides additional reassurance that valuable digital content is protected.

The My Passport Air portable hard drive allows users to password protect access to their drive and hardware encrypts its contents, providing powerful protection of personal material. In addition, its USB 3.0 interface dramatically increases read/write speeds to help users manage, share, and enjoy digital content at a pace that is commensurate with the schedules of today's mobile consumer.

WD, a Western Digital company and a world leader in storage solutions for the connected life, today expanded its recently introduced My Cloud family of personal cloud solutions with My Cloud EX4, a high-performance four-bay network attached storage (NAS) solution for creative professionals, prosumers, workgroups and anyone looking for a reliable way to save, share, back up, stream and manage massive amounts of digital data.

"The reception for our recently introduced My Cloud personal cloud platform was extremely positive," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD's branded products and consumer electronics groups. "Our single drive My Cloud system is the perfect solution for users that want an easy and private way to store all of their data at home and then share, save and manage it from anywhere in the world, on any device. Expanding our My Cloud platform to a four-bay system delivers the advanced features, customization capability and capacity that many of our customers are looking for."

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) announced today the pricing of the previously announced underwritten secondary public offering of 10,869,566 shares of its common stock by Hitachi, Ltd. (the "Selling Stockholder"), at a price to the public of $67.00 per share. The Selling Stockholder has also granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1,630,434 shares.

An aggregate amount of 25 million shares of the company's common stock were issued to the Selling Stockholder in connection with Western Digital's acquisition of Viviti Technologies Ltd., formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Holdings Pte. Ltd., in March 2012. Upon completion of the offering, the Selling Stockholder will beneficially own 14,130,434 shares of the company's common stock (12,500,000 shares if the underwriters exercise in full their option to purchase additional shares) and will continue to have two designated directors on the company's board of directors pursuant to the terms of an investor rights agreement between the company and the Selling Stockholder.

Western Digital Corp. today reported revenue of $3.8 billion and net income of $495 million, or $2.05 per share for its first fiscal quarter ended Sept. 27, 2013. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $514 million or $2.12 per share. In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $4.0 billion, net income of $519 million, or $2.06 per share. Non-GAAP net income in the year-ago quarter was $594 million, or $2.36 per share.

The company generated $680 million in cash from operations during the September quarter, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $4.9 billion. During the quarter, the company utilized $150 million to buy back 2.3 million shares of common stock. On Sept. 19, the company declared a $0.25 per common share dividend, which was paid on Oct. 15.

WD, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC) and world leader in digital storage solutions, today expanded its small- and medium-sized (SMB) storage solution portfolio with the introduction of the new WD Sentinel DS5100 and WD Sentinel DS6100 (S-series) ultra-compact network storage plus servers. The WD Sentinel S-series features high-performance Intel Xeon processors and are pre-installed with Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. All WD Sentinel network storage products feature WD enterprise-class hard drives and these 4-bay WD Sentinel S-series desktop appliances offer up to 16 TB of raw storage. Additionally, unlike traditional NAS systems, the WD Sentinel S-series allows small businesses to run line-of-business applications on their network storage platform.

"WD is using enterprise-class components to build a new family of network appliances for small businesses," said Bill Evans, general manager of WD's business storage solutions group. "The WD Sentinel S-series network appliances are engineered with Intel Xeon processors, pre-populated with WD Se datacenter 3.5-inch hard drives for rapid deployment, and feature dedicated 2.5-inch boot drives for maximum reliability. No other vendor offers a comparable network storage plus server in an equally small form factor. With a small footprint and quiet fan, an S-series appliance can be deployed anywhere."

WD, a Western Digital company and a world leader in storage solutions for the connected life, today introduced its new My Cloud family of personal cloud solutions. WD's My Cloud is a complete solution for users to organize, centralize and secure the digital content from all of their computers and mobile devices and access those files from any device, from anywhere in the world. By simply connecting a My Cloud personal cloud drive to the Internet, consumers get the anywhere, any-device access they can get from the public cloud, without having to pay monthly fees or giving up control of their personal data.

"We believe that there's no place like home for the cloud," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD's branded products and consumer electronics groups. "Everyone is inundated with thousands of digital files scattered across multiple computers and mobile devices, and controlling that chaos is a challenge. WD's personal cloud is the easiest, most secure and most affordable way for customers to control that chaos, with access to all of their files anywhere, anytime."

ASUSTOR Inc., a leading innovator and provider of network storage solutions, has announced today that all of its NAS products are fully compatible with WD's three newest models in its WD Red series of NAS hard drives. These new models consist of the 3.5" 4TB WD40EFRX model, 2.5" 1TB WD10JFCX model and 2.5" 750GB WD7500BFCX model. No matter if it is the higher capacity required for business applications or versatility required for home and SOHO applications, ASUSTOR NAS users can enjoy more flexibility and choice when selecting disks for their NAS devices.

All ASUSTOR NAS devices were designed to feature easy hard disk installation and hot swapping and all support the installation of both 2.5" and 3.5" hard disks. Additionally, ASUSTOR NAS supports online capacity expansion. This allows users who have low storage capacity needs or are on a budget to first start with lower capacity hard disks and then upgrade to larger ones as their storage needs grow. During the capacity expansion process the NAS remains online and fully ready for use allowing users to freely access all their data.

WD, a Western Digital company, has redesigned its popular My Book and My Book for Mac lines of external desktop drives to provide as much as 4 TB storage capacity and enhanced data protection for those who create and collect large volumes of data, video, music and photos.

With USB 3.0 for speed, the new My Book lines are available in 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB capacities for the largest content collections. At any point in time, anything can happen to one's data. Whether it's a lost notebook or destructive virus, it's critical to keep data safe and maintain a backup of important documents and valued content.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) announced today that its board of directors met in China, concluding two days in Beijing. The board is next traveling to Shenzhen SEZ, Guangdong Province, for site visits and additional meetings. "China is both a very important market for Western Digital as well as a key manufacturing base," said Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer, Western Digital Corporation. "As China further develops its technology industries, we look forward to expanding our relationships with a wide range of Chinese entities for the benefit of our shareholders, as well as our Chinese partners."

Over the course of its two days in Beijing, the board discussed China's development and future trends with a diverse group of Chinese and international experts. A highlight of the Beijing portion of the visit was a meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang. "The board is extremely impressed by China's growth and development plans, as explained by the Vice Premier, and appreciative of the support the Chinese government has extended to Western Digital Corporation in this exciting market," said Western Digital board chairman, Thomas E. Pardun. Pardun also added that it was important for the board to see firsthand Western Digital's operations in this key economy.

Keeping up with its product roadmaps, Western Digital rolled out WD Green 4 TB hard drive (model: WD40EZRX). Designed for personal desktops that need energy-efficient, high-capacity storage, the drive offers 4000 GB of unformatted space, which should yield about 3.6 TB under a Windows NTFS file-system. Built in the 3.5-inch form-factor, the drive features SATA 6 Gb/s interface, variable sub-6,000 RPM spindle-speeds, 64 MB cache, and acoustics management. When spinning and idling, the drive is designed to draw about 3.3W, which goes up to 4.5W under stress, and just 0.4W, when the drive is parked and spun-down. Available now, the WD Green 4 TB is priced between $170 and $190, depending on what package you choose.

So you're planning on building a NAS system. You've already selected your NAS unit (a Thecus, of course), but you're wondering what drives to put inside. SSDs? Nah, too pricey and a little small. So HDDs it is. But which ones do you buy? Are they all made the same? What speed RPM and what buffer size would be best for a NAS environment? If only HDD manufacturers would start building custom drives for network storage!

It just so happens, dear user, that today is your day. Western Digital has officially announced the release of its latest NAS-specific Red HDDs: the RD1000M and the RM500M. Designed specifically for Network Attached Storage systems, these latest members of the Red family feature 4TB of storage in a 3.5" enclosure (RD1000M) and 1TB or 750GB of storage in a 2.5" enclosure (RM500M).

WD, a Western Digital company and storage industry leader, today announced the expansion of its category-leading WD Red line of SATA hard drives specifically designed for home and small office NAS (network attached storage) systems with one- to five-drive bays. WD Red hard drives are now available in a 2.5-inch form factor offering 1 TB and 750 GB capacities and a new 3.5-inch 4 TB capacity. Powered by NASware 2.0 technology, WD Red is compatibility-tested with top NAS system manufacturers and optimized for performance and reduced power consumption.

"WD defined the NAS drive category by leading the development of hard drives specifically built for small NAS environments," said Matt Rutledge, vice president of client storage for WD. "The WD Red product line serves the unique environment of NAS and meets the growing demand for affordable, reliable, and compatible storage.