Western Digital announces new product branding, launches industry's first 2TB hard drive

MANILA, Philippines - Western Digital (WD), one of the IT storage industry’s pioneers and long-time leaders, recently launched a new product branding system in the Philippines.

Named BGB for Blue, Green and Black, the company has refined its 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch hard drive product names to distinct usage categories for desktop and notebook applications.

The new naming system aims to simplify the hard drive buying processes for Philippine users in choosing the WD hard drives that are in line with their work styles.

“Having been serving the Philippine market for many years now, WD has been among the most preferred hard drive brands for both MNC and local PC manufacturers in the Philippines,” said Tod Yagi, senior manager for WW channel marketing of Western Digital’s Component Business Units.

“With the new product branding system, Philippine customers can have a much better understanding of WD product classification, and we are also making it very simple for every storage buyer to quickly find the right drive for them,” Yagi added.

Under WD’s BGB campaign, WD Caviar Blue drives represent desktop performance and reliability, and are ideal for everyday users or business computing. The WD Scorpio Blue drives, on the other hand, are mobile 2.5-inch model for notebooks and mobile storage.

WD Caviar Green drives, meanwhile, offer significant power savings and are ideal for environmentally friendly PCs and external storage applications requiring lower power consumption and cool, quiet operation. 

Last but not least, WD Caviar Black drives, which represent maximum desktop performance, are ideal for power computing applications such as multimedia, video and photo editing, as well as extreme gaming computers. 

Its WD Scorpio Black 2.5-inch drive counterpart is designed to provide desktop-class performance for notebook computers.

To commemorate the launch of the new product branding, WD introduced the industry’s first two-terabyte (TB) hard drive — the WD Caviar Green 2TB drive. 

This new 3.5-inch platform is based on WD’s industry-leading 500 GB/platter technology (with 400 Gb/in2 areal density) with 32MB cache, producing drives with capacities of up to 2TB, which is the largest capacity in the market. 

WD Caviar Green hard drives reduce power consumption by up to 40 percent and offer best-in-class acoustics and operating temperature. Based on WD’s exclusive GreenPower Technology, these drives are designed to deliver power savings as the primary attribute.

“Saving power without sacrificing storage capacity is what consumers want, and what many businesses are requiring today. With the launch of the new WD Caviar Green 2TB hard drive, customers receive the additional capacity needed to operate today’s highly advanced programs and high-resolution digital files while using less power than typical drives with similar performance and capacities,” Yagi said.

A number of advanced technologies enable the speed, capacity and performance of WD’s Caviar Green 1.5TB and 2TB hard drives. These include StableTrac, which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations; and IntelliPower which fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.

The other technologies are IntelliSeek, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration; and the NoTouch ramp load technology, which is designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media, resulting in significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection while in transit.

The WD Caviar Green 2TB hard drive is priced at P14,495 and is available at select resellers and distributors. – Manny de los Reyes