Overview of Western Digital Hard Drives
History of Western Digital
Western Digital Corporation, which many also call WDC is a manufacturer of data storage devices. Here is a brief look at the history of Western Digital. This company was established in 1970 and operates a headquarters location in San Jose, California. Western Digital is renowned for manufacturing, developing, designing and marketing HDDs (hard disk drives), SSDs (solid state drives), enterprise storage platforms, and NAND flash based storage drives.
This corporation’s products are available under the different brand names like WD, SanDisk, G-technology and Western Digital. Alvin B Phillips, the founder of this company, first called it General Digital. Once everything was up and running, the company started receiving extra funds, which Alvin used to manufacture specialty semiconductors.
As time passed, Western Digital started making HDD controllers during the early 1980s. Two years later, the company introduced the Winchester disk drive controllers. The corporation’s popularity increased significantly since then, and it introduced a variety of items that we use today.
Are Western Digital Hard Drives Reliable?
Reliability and high performance are vital considerations when people are looking to upgrade their hard drives. Of course, every drive is bound to stop working after a certain period, but the more longevity it has, the better investment it will be. Western Digital is among the most renowned hard drive manufacturers out there, but those who haven’t used it often ask the question “are western digital hard drives reliable?”
Well, most users of this corporation’s hard drives believe that they are incredibly reliable and their failure rate is quite low. While some may argue that hard drives from other manufacturers are more reliable, it is important to keep in mind that reliability and failure rate often vary by capacity and model.
That said, the hard drives manufactured by Western Digital can last for years, as long as users handle them with care. Sure, there may be some pieces that may not last as long, but the same is true for hard drives manufactured by other companies.
How Long Do Western Digital Hard Drives Last?
Western Digital has two critical metrics one must consider to determine how long their hard drives could potentially last. These metrics include the warranty and the unload/load cycle count.
What is the Unload and Load Count?
This count is essentially the potential amount of times hard drives can start the spindle’s spin-up for generating disk rotation for the write and read heads, after which it returns to its original position.
Now, let us answer the question, “how long do western digital hard drives last?”
Purple: The purple lines found in Western Digital drives are optimized to ensure regular use by systems that run continuously. These include, write intensive apps, surveillance etc. The uploading rating for the purple line is 300,000 with a warranty of three years.
Red: The red line on Western Digital is there for storage options that are attached to a network. This line comes with a warranty of three years and provides 600,000 uploads and loads.
Black: This line is present in the high performance drives that are used for audiovisual content creation and gaming. The black lines warranty lasts for five years and its upload and load rating is 300,000.
Blue:This line is present in the mainstream computing drives of Western Digital and it comes with a warranty of three years and 300,000 unload/load cycles.
Western Digital My Book Not Recognized
Did you search Google for “western digital my book not recognized?” Well, there are plenty of others who did the same and for a good reason. At its core, the Western Digital My Book external HD helps users store loads and loads of documents, videos, and photos. The device is also time machine compatible and comes with backup software for Mac devices. Western Digital especially designs them to be efficient, reliable and dynamic. My Book has built in security tools for helping users keep their files secure and safe.
Users can also connect their My Book to Mac or Windows using a USB cable. In some cases, however, the WD hard drive isn’t recognized on laptops and PCs. Fortunately, you can potentially resolve this issue by unplugging or restarting your PC. However, if the problem still persists, consider following the steps mentioned below:
- Check if your My Book is properly connected to the PC
- Find the drive manager by going to the start menu
- Open the device manager and choose “expand universal serial bus controllers”
- Select the properties option on USB Root Hub
- Choose the power management option present at the top
- Check if you have selected the “allow computer to shut down this device”
- If it is selected, make sure to deselect it and press OK