14 DAY TRIAL // Hard drives are growing increasingly threatened by SSDs, though at a slow pace, and makers of such units will have to come up with ways of keeping this storage technology appealing, hence Western Digital's new research and development center.
As end-users know, Western Digital is one of the major worldwide suppliers of hard disk drive units, even bigger than Seagate if reports are to be believed.
Of course, solid state drives have been gaining traction, but they are still very expensive and much less capacious than HDDs.
Considering that many file types are getting larger and larger, especially videos in high quality, systems need increasingly high capacities.
Western Digital decided that further research and development efforts were necessary, so it set up a new center for such things In Singapore.
It bears the simple name of Western Digital Singapore HDD R&D Center and will develop future technologies for HDD recording heads and media, plus manufacturing processes and system design.
"Singapore has built a wealth of engineering talent, now available to WD," said Tim Leyden, WD chief operating officer.
"This is a product of a supportive government, R&D resources from DSI and universities, and a long history of hard drive industry manufacturing and engineering operations in the country. The resulting environment has produced an advanced technology research and human resource culture that makes Singapore an ideal location for WD investments."
In addition to the R&D center, WD also revealed that it was entering a collaboration with DSI. Moving forward, about 65 research engineers will be hired (within 3 years) and $390 million USD will be invested in 5 years.
"DSI is very pleased to be collaborating with WD. I believe we will be able to add value to one another, further pushing the limits of drive technology and bringing about new and advanced storage solutions to the industry," said Dr. Pantelis Alexopoulos, executive director of DSI.