Disassembling Western Digital Elements SE HD case and mainboard
Tools
These are some common tools used to work on this device. You might not need every tool for every procedure.
Background and Identification
Western Digital (WD) is an American hard drive disk manufacturer and data storage company founded in 1970. By designing and producing data technology products, WD is one of the largest manufacturers of computer hard drive disks, SSDs (solid state drives) and flash memory devices. Competitors of WD include Seagate Technology and Micron Technology.
Western Digital sells its products under several of its own brands including the WD brand, SanDisk, and G-Technology. The WD brand has product families called the My Passport, My Book, and WD Elements. While these products have traditionally used HDDs (hard disk drives), Western Digital does offer SSD versions of their newer drives. As of 2019, the WD Elements line consists of WD Elements Portable (1-5TB, 4.3 x 3.2 x 0.5 inch), WD Elements Desktop (3-14 TB, 5.3 x 1.8 x 6.5 inch), and WD Elements SE.
Based on their intended use, Western Digital color-codes certain cases of storage devices.
- Green: Eco-friendly
- Blue: General desktop purpose
- Purple: Surveillance drives
- Red: Network-attached storage drives
- Black: High performance
- Gold: Data-center drives
The WD Green drives are energy efficient and are currently only available as an SSD as the WD Green HDD series was discontinued in 2015. The Purple WD drives are aimed for write-heavy workloads—security applications (recording video)—and feature AllFrame technology, which attempts to reduce video frame loss, time limited error recovery, and support for the ATA streaming command set.