Western Digital Starts Shipping New Computer Disk Drives

Western Digital Corp. said Tuesday that it has begun shipping a new line of computer disk drives and that the product could become a sizable part of its overall disk drive sales during the year.

The Irvine personal computer products manufacturer said it began in March to ship a 3.5-inch Caviar brand disk drive, which can store 212 megabytes of data, roughly equal to 100,000 single-spaced, typewritten pages of paper. Disk drives, which store data in personal computers, account for roughly two thirds of the company’s sales.

The company shipped 20,000 of the new drives in March and hopes to be shipping five times that amount in the coming quarters, said Robert J. Blair, company spokesman. Western Digital shipped about 600,000 disk drives of all types in its second quarter ended Dec. 31. Blair said customers for the new drives include AST Research Inc. in Irvine and Gateway 2000 in North Sioux City, S.D.