In 1999, WD partnered with TiVo to develop a 500MB external hard drive that could hold 140 hours of HD content. Seeing the hot sale of the series, WD was determined to devote itself to the hard drive market. 3 Years later, WD launched Caviar series of hard drives. In 1988, WD officially started hard drive design and manufacturing.
Then, WD turned to the production of floppy disks and hard disk control chips due to the collapse of its largest customer in the economic crisis in the mid-1970s, which marked that WD began to enter the data storage market. Initially, WD was a manufacturer of MOS test equipment.