LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Sept. 15, 2003 - Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced that it is enhancing the throughput, performance and capacity of its popular enterprise-class Serial ATA (SATA) 10,000 RPM WD Raptor hard drives, offering enterprise customers an increasingly compelling reason to reduce the cost of their storage. The next-generation WD Raptor drives offer 74 GB and performance-boosting Ultra/150 Command Queuing (Ultra/150 CQ) technology, as well as Rotary Accelerometer Feed Forward (RAFF) technology -- all at significantly less cost than comparable SCSI drives -- and establish Western Digital with the broadest SATA lineup for enterprise applications. The company expects to begin shipment of the new WD Raptor drives with Ultra/150 CQ in November of this year.

Enterprise storage industry vendors have quickly embraced SATA hard drives as a reliable and cost-effective choice for servers and storage systems, for which WD Raptor offers the greatest performance and reliability of all SATA hard drives available today. The next-generation WD Raptor model will be demonstrated with technology partners Marvell (Booth No. 313), Promise (Booth No. 337) and Silicon Image (Booth No. 436) at the Intel Developer Forum, beginning tomorrow in San Jose, Calif.

"Enterprise storage will change dramatically during the next few years and SATA will be one of the primary interfaces," said Richard E. Rutledge, vice president of marketing for Western Digital. "The popularity and demand for WD Raptor have made our entry into this market segment successful and, together with WD Caviar® SE SATA drives, position Western Digital as the leader with the widest SATA product offering for enterprise customers."

"The high performance of WD Raptor and the high capacity of WD Caviar - teamed in two RAID groups - offer my customers an extremely flexible system," said Mohammad Tahmasebi, president and CEO of Dynamic Network Factory. Based in Hayward, Calif., Dynamic Network Factory provides network storage equipment, enterprise RAID storage systems and High Availability servers.

Serial ATA (SATA) interface technology offers storage providers and customers the critical reliability, availability, scalability and performance attributes that enterprise environments demand.

"Serial ATA will not only become the massive-volume standard drive interface for all desktop and notebook PCs but will also enable high-performance, high-capacity SATA-interface drives to make greater incursions in multi-user applications," said John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner Dataquest. "We believe that multi-user configurations of ATA-based disk drives will grow from 3.3 million units in 2003 to 11.1 million units in 2007."

WD Raptor drives are designed to deliver enterprise-class specifications with 1.2 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), 10,000 RPM, 4.5 milliseconds (ms) average seek time, and a five-year warranty. Combined with a SATA interface, the enterprise-class mechanical and electronics platform of WD Raptor hard drives is designed to meet the 24x7 demands of the enterprise environment.

Western Digital's Ultra/150 CQ technology optimizes the sequence of data transfers to the hard drive from the host, providing increased data transfer efficiency, which results in higher performance and throughput for enterprise applications. The issuance and completion of one command may be simultaneous with the data transfer of another command, thus minimizing rotational and drive seek latency.

The new WD Raptor drives employ RAFF technology to maintain hard drive performance in high vibration environments through adaptive compensation of the servo system. WD Raptor 74 GB drive utilizes Fluid Dynamic Bearings (FDB) to reduce noise and increase long-term reliability.

"In today's budget-sensitive business environment, all customers benefit from the performance and dramatic cost savings of Serial ATA and RAID; and WD Raptor elevates these benefits to the next level," said Charles Liang, CEO and president of SuperMicro. Located in Silicon Valley, SuperMicro manufacturers server solutions and motherboards and provides high computing density servers, motherboards and chassis through the channel in more than 100 countries worldwide.

About Western Digital

Western Digital, one of the storage industry's pioneers and long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital
information. The company produces reliable, high-performance hard drives that keep users' data close-at-hand and secure from loss.

Western Digital was founded in 1970. The company's storage products are marketed to leading systems manufacturers and selected resellers under the Western Digital brand name. Visit the Investor section of the company's Web site (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.

This release contains forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the adoption and ramp of Serial ATA, expected shipping dates for WD Raptor 74 GB hard drives with Ultra/150 CQ and RAFF technology, and future changes in enterprise storage. These forward-looking statements are based on current management expectations, and actual results may differ materially as a result of several factors, including: uncertainties related to the development and introduction of products based on new technologies, difficulties faced in manufacturing ramp, pricing, competition, the significant uncertainty of market acceptance of new products, and other factors discussed in Western Digital's recent SEC filings. Western Digital undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of these statements.

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