Western Digital Unveils 13-Gigabyte Drive Today

Irvine-based Western Digital Corp., coming off its worst quarterly earnings report ever, will unveil its latest hard drive for personal computers today as it gains ground on rivals in the race to be first to market.

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

The company’s latest poor earnings results, released last week, were 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.

Western’s magnetoresistive-based drives also come with technology that automatically detects, isolates and repairs possible problem areas on a hard drive. According to company officials, return rates have been reduced by as much as half among drives with the technology, which has been available 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.