Western Digital Ships New Products: Western Digital...

Western Digital Ships New Products: Western Digital Corp. said Tuesday that it has begun shipping two new computer components, including a hard disk drive that could account for a substantial part of its revenue for the year.

Robert Blair, spokesman for the Irvine-based company, said sales of the new Caviar 340-megabyte, 3.5-inch disk drives for personal computers could reach $40 million for the company’s second fiscal quarter, which ends Dec. 31. Each disk drive can store the equivalent of about 170,000 single-spaced typewritten pages.

Gateway 2000, a computer maker in South Dakota, has received the first shipment of the new drives. Western Digital has also shipped its Paradise Accelerator Card for Windows to Texas-based Dell Computer Corp., which will use them in a new line of PCs.

The cards are electronic circuit boards that improve the speed of graphics operations in computing.