Home Enterprise Marvell and Western Digital Celebrate Billion-Drive Milestone

Marvell and Western Digital Celebrate Billion-Drive Milestone

by Mark Kidd

Marvell and Western Digital have announced a milestone in their decade-long business relationship. Since the partnership began in 2001, Marvell’s shipments to WD have increased significantly, now totaling over one billion units. WD and Marvell will build on this successful history to develop new storage solutions across a broad spectrum of applications and emerging technologies including advanced signal processing technologies and progressive integration techniques.


Marvell and Western Digital have announced a milestone in their decade-long business relationship. Since the partnership began in 2001, Marvell’s shipments to WD have increased significantly, now totaling over one billion units. WD and Marvell will build on this successful history to develop new storage solutions across a broad spectrum of applications and emerging technologies including advanced signal processing technologies and progressive integration techniques.

The WD-Marvell relationship began with discrete read channel and controller solutions in PATA drives which have since evolved into today’s highly integrated SATA and SAS-based systems-on-chips (SoCs). Marvell is now shipping its 8th-generation SATA SoC solution to WD, which includes innovations such as low-density parity check (LDPC), a linear error correcting code technology that filters interference and other corrupting noise from data streams.

The billion drive milestone comes at a time when Western Digital and Marvell are nearing full recovery from the devastating Thailand floods. With industry consolidation and hard drive demand quite strong, the two billion drive milestone could happen before this decade is complete.

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