The company produces its data storage products for everyday users, gamers, creative professionals and small businesses up to enterprises and public clouds.

Its portfolio of digital storage includes internal[3][4] and external drives[5][6] for desktop, mobile, photography, gaming, security, data centers and artificial intelligence (AI).

[14] It rapidly became a specialty semiconductor maker, with start-up capital provided by several individual investors and industrial giant Emerson Electric.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the family of controllers based on the WD1003 provided the bulk of Western Digital's revenues and profits, and for a time generated enormous corporate growth.

Much of the mid-to-late 1980s saw an effort by Western Digital to use the profits from their ATA storage controllers to become a general-purpose OEM hardware supplier for the PC industry.

[18] By 1991, things were starting to slow down, as the PC industry moved from ST-506 and ESDI drives to ATA and SCSI, and thus were buying fewer hard disk controller boards.

That year saw the rise of Western Digital's Caviar drives, brand new designs that used the latest in embedded servo and computerized diagnostic systems.

Around 1995, the technological lead that the Caviar drives had enjoyed was eclipsed by newer offerings from other companies, especially Quantum Corp., and Western Digital fell into a slump.

The Portfolio drive (a 3-inch (76 mm) form factor model, developed with JT Storage) was a flop, as was the SDX hard disk to CD-ROM interface.

The idea worked, and Western Digital regained respect in the press and among users, even despite a recall in 2000 (which was due to bad motor driver chips).

[19] In 2003, Western Digital acquired most of the assets of bankrupt one-time market leading magnetic hard drive read-write head developer Read-Rite Corporation for $95 million.

[20] In the same year, Western Digital offered the first 10,000 rpm Serial ATA HDD, the WD360GD "Raptor", with a capacity of 36 GB and an average access time of less than six milliseconds.

In 2006, Western Digital introduced its My Book line of mass market external hard drives that feature a compact book-like design.

On October 7, 2007, Western Digital released several editions of a single 1 TB hard drive, the largest in its My Book line.

[citation needed] In October 2009, Western Digital announced the shipment of first 3 TB internal hard disk drive, which has 750 GB-per-platter density with SATA interface.

[16] In March 2012, Western Digital completed the acquisition of HGST and became the largest traditional hard drive manufacturer in the world.

In February 2014, Western Digital announced a new "Purple" line of hard disk drives for use in video surveillance systems, with capacities from 1 to 4 TB.

[36] In August 2017, Western Digital bought cloud storage provider Upthere, with the intention to continue building out the service.

[42][43] In December 2017, Western Digital reached an agreement with Toshiba about the sale of the jointly owned NAND production facility in Japan.

[51][52][53] In June 2021, users reported that their My Book Live NAS drives, which were discontinued products last manufactured in 2013, had been erased, leading to the company advising that the devices be disconnected from the internet.

[54] In August 2021, Western Digital and Japanese memory-chip supplier Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) began working out the details of a merger to be finalized in September 2021.

[63] In the October earnings call, Western Digital announced it would spin off its flash memory business, effectively reversing the SanDisk merger by the second half of 2024.

[69] Western Digital color-codes certain storage devices based on their intended use case:[70][71] WD Green drives are energy efficient and are currently only available as an SSD.

These drives feature AllFrame technology, which attempts to reduce video frame loss, time limited error recovery, and support for the ATA streaming command set.

[79] Western Digital external hard drives with encryption software (sold under the My Passport brand) have been reported to have severe data protection faults and to be easy to decrypt.

Under the SanDisk brand, Western Digital offers mobile storage products, cards and readers, USB flash drives, SSDs and MP3 players.

[84][85][86] The 400 GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card was designed primarily for use in Android smartphones that include an expansion slot.

The WD TV series of products functioned as a home theater PC, able to play videos, images, and music from USB drives or network locations.

In September 2015, Western Digital released My Cloud OS 3, a platform that enables connected HDDs to sync between PCs and mobile devices.

[97][98] Western Digital sells data center hardware and software[99] including an enterprise-class Ultrastar product line[100] that was previously sold under the HGST brand.