Western Digital to Unveil Giant PC Hard Drive

Irvine-based Western Digital Corp., coming off its worst quarterly earnings report ever, today unveils its latest hard drive for personal computers as it gains ground on the two market leaders in terms of being first to market.

The newest in the Caviar line holds 13 gigabytes of data and is the fourth drive Western Digital has produced using magneto resistive technology, which allows for higher capacities and uses fewer components.

The company’s latest poor earnings report, released last week, had been exacerbated by quality control problems with the last generation of drives using older, thin-film technology, which the company has stopped using. Those difficulties resulted in a one-time charge of $77 million.

Now, Western’s magneto resistive-based drives also come with technology that automatically detects, isolates and repairs possible problem areas on a hard drive, which company officials said has reduced return rates by as much as half among drives with the technology, which has been out for about four months.

The new 13-gigabyte drives will be available at retailers by mid-November, said John Burger, vice president of Western Digital’s personal storage group, but PC manufacturers are still in the process of qualifying the drives for their machines.

The 13-gigabyte drives, among the industry’s first to use a new interface that promises to boost both data transfer rates and data integrity, should hit the street at a price of $339, the company said.

*

Jonathan Gaw covers technology and electronic commerce for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7818 and at jonathan.gaw@latimes.com.