Inside Western Digital: How Tomorrow's Storage Gets Made
Inside Western Digital: How Tomorrow's Storage Gets MadeMy first hard drive, entombed in a 1988 XT clone, stored 20 megabytes and clicked and chugged almost as much as my dad’s Buick. Back then, I worried about preserving 30KB text files. Now, I have to preserve, well, everything.
Perhaps like you, I’ve lost count of how many terabytes of capacity I have at my disposal, both on hand and online. We all know that solid state storage is great for speed and for shaving off seconds from your level load times, but hard drives safeguard your life. Your papers, projects, photos, bank reports, movies, music collection—every valuable byte of data you own—is probably stored on magnetic platters. Where do these platters come from? How are they designed and tested? Maybe most importantly, given that my personal storage needs have exploded by literally 100,000 times since that first hard drive 23 years ago, how can I know that my ever-escalating capacity needs will continue to be affordably met five or ten years from now?
When you buy a car, you look under the hood. Given the critical importance of hard disk storage in all of our lives, we thought you might want a peek under that hood, too. Now that Western Digital is in the business of breaking new capacity records (the latest Caviar Green was the first drive to hit 2TB, for example), we jumped at the chance to take a first-ever, unrestricted tour of its California R&D facilities. This is the place where magnetic technology of the 1950s meets the nano- and quantum-level technologies of the current decade.
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I've switched to Samsung drives though. ^_^
And at the pic on page 26, she's checking her farmville. (At my job we hired an insanely expensive technician to fix some really expensive equipment, which he did with his laptop... and he has checking his farmville... at a few hundred dollars per hour on the company dime of course.)
Interesting that there appeared to be no drainage for the emergency shower. They just jerry rig that thing up at the last moment and hope no one has to use it?
Also, that walkthrough video is quite depressing. Yellow rooms as far as the eye can see, without a smile in sight.
Thank you very much for this wonderful article. As much as I'd like to, I doubt I could ever work there, because my handa aren't stable enough just to take a damned picture, nevermind handle extremely precise equipment. =)
But I wonder, how many drive failures have they had because an employee dropped a contact into the drive?
Also, great to see that little sneak preview on WD NAND based storage.
Now, how about Intel and 32nm?
I just hope that WDD has done it right this time!
I think the manufacturing process is very much like an assembly line process where the production flow is rather fluent which is not the impression I get at a first glance when looking through these photos. They obviously achieve som degree of economies of scale. It would be interesting too see some figures such as how long it takes to produce a platter, head, and so on and how many units/components per hour that is being produced etc.
Then look at for example picture 28 (or 25-32); I don't understand how these large electoplated platters turn into read/write heads of a harddrive. I don't see the part where these wafers are punched into small needles (sliders/heads) and how this is done.
Great article btw. Not sure I share the authors humor, but I suppose it beats kevins.
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When you enter the dialogue consider suggesting the designers to make scripts perform according to standards. After all the javascript bugs have been around for like a year now without anyone solving it. (the one where, in ie7,ie8,chrome or firefox3, clicking submit just gives a 'javsscript void' statement in the status bar but doesn't submit anything ; usually rating and citing doesn't work in those situations either, but not always) or perhaps suggest making the talkback equal on both toms hardware and guide. Sometimes on toms guide the links to talkback aren't in the 'news' section of the forum which generates a different layout where our belowed avatars are still shown but the citation and rating features are less available due to design.
Also the login bug should be adressed some time - u know ... the one in ie where you're being redirected to an error page if you don't press escape quickly enough (to stop faulty script playback likely caused by the adds).
Anyway the gallery's annoying too ofc. Not only the fact that images aren't sorted in the order the article uses them, but also the multistage opening you mentioned.
That was the dressing room no? perhaps he just wasn't dressed up yet
A pub with no beer and a man with no beard ...