Western Digital Reports Earning Triples in 1Q

Western Digital Corp., which makes hard drives for computers and digital video recorders, said Thursday that profit in its first fiscal quarter tripled over the same period last year, when the results were weighed down by big charges.

Shares of Western Digital fell 72 cents, or 5.2 percent, to $13.05 in regular trading. In extended trading after the financial results were released, the shares jumped $1.51, or 11.6 percent, to $14.56.

The company said it earned $211 million, or 93 cents per share, in the quarter ended Sept. 26.

Analysts were expecting the company to earn 81 cents per share, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

In the same quarter last year, the company earned $69 million, or 31 cents per share, including $109 million in charges tied to taxes and an acquisition.

Revenue in the most recent quarter rose 19 percent to $2.11 billion from $1.77 billion a year ago, and unit shipments rose 34 percent.

Analysts were expecting sales of $2.07 billion.

Coraid comes up with 24-drive network storage appliance

Coraid on Wednesday introduced the EtherDrive SR2421 Storage Appliance. The rack-mountable storage system contains a hardware RAID controller and space for 24 Serial ATA (SATA) disks and costs $4,995 (without storage).
The two dozen slots for drives can each accommodate a 1 terabyte (TB) drive mechanism, for a combined storage capacity of 24TB. It supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 10, and can also be used as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). The shelf is equipped with a universal power supply, and it's shipped on standard cabinet-mount slide-out rails. It's designed to fit in equipment cabinets with a depth of 28 to 33 inches.

The SR2421 is designed to be a self-contained network attached storage device. It includes Coraid firmware running on an embedded Plan9 OS. Operating system support includes Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Windows.