WD Caviar®
The trade name for Western Digital’s line of hard drives for desktop personal computers.
WD Enterprise
The trade name for Western Digital’s line of enterprise hard drives.
Winchester Disk
Former code name for an early IBM hard disk model, sometimes still used to refer to the technology and design of most traditional hard drives.
Windows
Microsoft’s series of operating systems for personal computers. Currently popular versions are Windows 95 and Windows 98.
Word
Two bytes that are processed together in a single operation.
Workstation
A personal computer with exceptional capacity and performance capabilities for use mainly in engineering, design and audiovisual applications demanding immediate access to data and the ability to manipulate it in technically sophisticated ways.
Write
The recording of flux reversals onto the magnetic surface of a disk.
Write Cache
High speed RAM used to buffer data transfer from the host to the hard drive.
Write Verify
Immediately after writing data to the disk, a drive with the Write Verify feature will verify that it can read the data it just wrote to the disk to ensure that it will be able to retrieve it later. If the drive is unable to read the data, it writes it to another area of the disk, where it attempts to write verify it again.