NZXT PODCAST - #130 - Special Guest: Michael from WD_Black!

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

This week on the podcast, Mike and Wes talk with Michael from WD_Black! We talk about the NZXT x WD_Black partnership, gaming, and storage! Would you rather fight a chicken everytime you got into a car or fight a chimpanzee once a year, but you get a sword? Michael says Chimpanzee, but we disagree. Tune in live every Thursday at 10AM PT on [twitch.tv/NZXT](https://twitch.tv/NZXT) and send your questions to: [e-mail]

and welcome to episode 130 of the NZXT podcast, the official podcast of the NXT community. This podcast is recorded live every Thursday on the official NZXT Twitch and is available to stream on demand on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. My name is Mike Kim, and with me is Wes. How are you doing today, Wes? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me today.

It's been a while since I've been here, but I'm glad to step in the shoes of Ivan, because I'm bitty big shoes to fill. So I'm very excited. But yeah, it should be a lot of fun. And, you know, with us today is a very special guest all the way from Western Digital. We have Mike here. So, Mike, want you go ahead and introduce yourself.

Hey, guys. My name is Michael Hong. I work for Western Digital. And I focus primarily on all the consumer brands. So WD Black, Sandus, WD, and Western Digital. So, yeah, a lot of the things that you guys see, not only on the Twitch side, online, that's coming from myself and the team, but I would say mostly my team, right?

They do all the work. I'm just here. I'm just here to talk. So, yeah, nice being here, guys. Thank you. Of course. Thanks for having it. Thanks for coming on.

Yep. Yeah. So, I mean, you want me to talk about kind of what I do? I mean, it's up to you how you want me to do it? Yeah, Wes, do you want to ask some of the questions real quick for like introductions and stuff? Sure. Let's kick this off. So, yeah, you know, I mean, I've known you for a long time. You know, your past business, you know, coincided with NST. But, you know, want you just tell us a little bit more about how you started out Western Digital and, you know, how you ended up there. And yeah, yeah, I think you're from there. Yeah. So the previous company that I used to work for, you know, I was the marketing manager there. And we, we. helped kind of rebrand that and built up that business. And at that time, when I was there,

I was building a lot of designing a lot of cases as well and kind of building those initiatives in terms of e-sports, the gaming brand and the PC. And then when I left, you know, it's funny, I consulted for you guys for a little bit. I would say about a year shooting a lot of NXT commercials and like walk-through videos and things like that. I believe they're still on YouTube somewhere. but yeah it's right uh you shot like so like the motherboard right yeah motherboards uh all the h series cases the walkthroughs um GPU uh shroud like there's many many things i shot quite a bit um it's it's even your voice too in some of them right it is my voice which is weird to hear um but i kind of like did it at the time i was living in the midwest so i had a whole basement and it was so easy to have a

full studio to myself, right? Everything was set up. Every time you guys sent me a full PCR system, brought it downstairs, turn on the lights, I was basically ready to go, right, to shoot all that content. So, yeah, it was a lot of fun doing it. But from there, I was then consulting for Western Digital for the WD Black brand. Right. So that was when we rebranded WD Black in 2019.

I'm not sure if you guys know about that history. Do you guys know anything about kind of the kind of like the W. Black rebrand at all? Not so much. I mean, I know it's kind of focused towards like the gaming market. Yeah, that's about all I know. Yeah, I can share some insight on that. So obviously Western, you know, Western Digital has been around for 51 plus years, right? I would say the longest in storage.

But the W. Black brand has been around for a very, very long time. It's always been focused on performance. but I think in 2019 is when we launched the rebrand. But when you look at the WD Black logo for anybody who is watching, you'll see that there's an underscore in the logo. That underscore was originally, people didn't want it there, right? But I really, really fought very hard to keep that underscore. The reason being is because I see it as kind of like a cursor

to where a starting point of any game, any program, there's always something that starts, right? And WD Black is kind of like, you know, you need storage in order to start and store anything that you kind of create. So we felt that that made a lot of sense. And, you know, keeping obviously WD Black and stealthy and black. Yeah, that's good. Were you saying something, Mike?

No, I was a, I forgot to put the underscore. I was like, ooh, I forgot to put that. That's my bad. No, no, it's okay. It's all right. You know, we still have the old branding, you know, like I'm sure we have that trademark. where too. So it still works. But yeah, that's how it kind of started. But in terms of like the brand,

right, we, I was brought on to like, where do we focus? Where do we, where do we message that brand? And it came down to not really much focusing on the product, but on the community, just like you guys, right? You're very heavily on the community. And look, you guys have grown so crazily that it's, I remember one time you just all of a sudden shopped to a million followers. I was like, wait, that's been like, it only took two months, two or three months. It was pretty insane to see. But yeah, that's where we kind of focus on, kind of having that community tell us their stories and hoping that obviously our products that meet up to their standards.

And that's what we strive for. But, but yeah, that's how WD Black all started. That's 20, crazy. In terms of rebrand. Do not know that. That's actually pretty interesting that you actually fought for it. Because I know most brands out there, they want their name to be kind of like, you know, peer. You know, they don't want any spaces or they don't want it to have any underscores or punctuations or anything like that.

So it's really interesting that you tried to actually fight for the actual underscore into it. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think keeping everything black, obviously a color that matches pretty much everybody's build. You know, black works for everything. So it kind of works out even when we started making kind of clothes. thing, you know, everybody wants to wear black, right? So it just all worked out. I mean, I remember, Wes, you sent me a NZXT purple nomad, like kind of like sling bag. I still wear that today, actually.

I wear it when I travel because this is nice and easy. But I don't know, maybe Mike is a little jealous because he doesn't have it. Maybe he does have it. I don't know. I do have one. You should have it. Oh, yeah? Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Those popped out when Mike was actually an intern here. Oh, wow. We did our whole little pop-up shop. I remember on Anime Expo? God, what was it, like four years now? Three years?

Yeah, like four years ago, I think. I have no track of time. Once we went on lockdown, like, just like how many years ago was anything before? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, like, the underscore, like, I mean, NSXs used to have a period at the end. And I remember that one day we erased it and turned it into Pucci and, you know, the rest is history. Yeah.

I do remember that. Oh, actually, we, I did want us to, before we go straight into WD and everything like that, there were a couple questions I wanted to ask about just you in general, before we go straight into like a company and everything like that. Like, what got you into the gaming industry in general? Like, what made you wander into here go, you know what? I like this place. What do you want to start, man?

I don't know. Like, it's, I don't want to go too far. Well, I guess this has to be a story that I have to tell. But so I don't want to have too much of a sob story, but, you know, my, we grew up, we grew up very poor. My parents and I and my brother. But I was living with my grandparents in Sacramento at the time. I was around, I was around six years old. And my parents lived in the Midwest is where I'm from, kind of like saving up for a house having a job.

But that's time the NES, you know, Nintendo Entertainment System was it just got released. And my dad saved up kind of like his money every single month to buy me that system. And from the Midwest to Sacramento, California, he took a bus. And from there, he held onto the system the entire time because he didn't want anybody to steal it. And he knew that I would, I wanted it. I loved it, right? That I would love it. So from then, since six years old, my dad delivered me that.

NES system and I just fell in love with gaming. I played I played games every day of my life since then, right? Maybe it is mobile, maybe it's console, maybe it's PC, but that I would say was kind ingrained into my life at a child, as a childhood, but and then it came into this where oh well, I'm working on things with gaming PCs now I'm designing things and now kind of WD Black. That kind of in me was I feel like it was destined for me to kind of do this, but I'm sure I could have done something else, but I don't think I would have been as happy, right?

This is by far the best job I've ever had. And kind of being able to focus on my passion, especially something that's been ingrained so heavily in my life is a dream, basically. So, yeah, that's how I got here. That's awesome. I love that story. Yeah, that's a great story. That's like a future Hallmark movie right there.

Yeah, I know, right? You're dead. Just like a man on the bus with his Nintendo. Yeah. Or you could turn it into like a kick-ass, like 80s action movie where you fighting off all these people, you know, but you got to keep the Nintendo pristine the whole time. Yeah, pixel, pixelated game.

I mean, it makes sense for that, you know, 8-bit. So that would be perfect. And then going along with gaming, what is your favorite game of as of now? And then favorite game of all time. So we got the two different versions. Oh, man. Right now, Apex Legends is, I would say, is my favorite game. That's a game that I can always pick up and play.

Who's your main? I mean, Lifeline is kind of my main, but I do Bloodhound. I got a lot. And I don't know. I try to switch it up. I try the new characters, but honestly, I'm just not good. I'm not good at it. I'm more of a support character, honestly.

But I let the rest of the team kind of like carry me because they're much better. They have more time to play. I have very limited time. So that's something I can always pick up. And I love the competitive aspect of it. I would say to me, that's the best battle royale for me to play, right? Because once in a while, I'll play, you know, arenas, and I'll play kind of like just the general battle royale.

But for me, yeah, Apex Legends. Wow, that's a statement. Yeah, favorite game of all time. That's tough, man. I'll give you this. My favorite series is Legend of Zelda. The Zelda series is my favorite series. It's hard for me to pinpoint which one's my favorite,

because each one is so different, right? Breath of Wild is so different than Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past that, yeah, I still pick up Link in the Past once in a while to count play that. I love that. Awesome. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, it's a big one in this house for sure.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wife lives in Breeze, Zelda. I mean, I've been a huge fan too, but yeah, Link of the Pass is my favorite. Ocarina is her favorite. and we're split on if we like Breath of the Wild. I love it. She hates it.

She hates it? Why she hate it? Because they departed from a lot of like the classic things like, you know, going to like dungeons and collecting certain weapons to do things. I think she missed that. So when I play The Wild, I'm not sure if you guys played this way, I turn off the map. I've never once had the map turned on. And I highly suggest anybody who hasn't played that way, play it that way.

way because the game is so well designed. And this is how you know a game is well designed is by just visually, you get all the cues that you would have from having the map on and all that kind of like the extras on, right? Because when Link gets too cold, he shakes. When he gets too hot, he sweats, right? And all those things, those visual elements in the game is so well designed that if you see a little fire or spark at the end of a mountain,

you can climb that and just head that direction. And that game is about exploration. and I highly suggest people play that way. And that's how I'm going to play Breath of Wild too. And just get lost in it, right? And that's what I loved about that game, where elements just came out, like, this huge rock giant popped out of nowhere for the first time.

Like, it freaked me out. I was like, this game is insane. And, yeah, I wouldn't do that with Eldon Ring or anything like that. But, I mean, yeah, it's a... I would say, yes, for a breath of a wild, I turn off everything on the screen just to be fully immersed. and it's literally a well-designed game. Do you not fast travel or anything?

What was that? Do you not fast travel or anything? Do you just run around? Once a while, I'll fast travel, but I think I spent close to 100 hours on that game because I literally just explored and beat that game the way, like, you know, I'll link wood, I guess, you know? So it made more sense. Yeah, I was going to say, is like, do you then take notes and stuff to, like, make up for the map?

Do you, like, do you become, like, your own cartographer? for, I wrote it down my phone. Yeah, I did write it down on my phone, yeah. Because you do get lost, right? Like, it's obviously you get lost in like the different dungeons that you're trying to to go to, I think, you know, you will forget it. But you can put like the waypoints or the points in the map as well to kind of remind yourself.

So I do it that way as well. Cool. Yeah, it's a neat way. Like maybe I do need to kind of revisit that game a little bit. I never got into that DLC. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I can't wait for part two. I mean, I think they, I said, what, next year or so? Better be. Yeah, yeah. I'll be ready. I'll be there, a block out 100 hours for it. Point is a PTO just a bit like, yeah, I just got to disappear for a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leave of absence is where, since it's on stream, I'm sure people are watching, yeah, just in case. It's a, yeah, it's a medical issue. I'll be sick that. I know I'll be sick. That's when I usually get sick. Yeah. It's always around these drops. So, yeah.

Great. Yeah, I love that. Wes, do you want to go into a little bit about, like, the company and how, like, our partnerships and everything like that? Yeah. So, I mean, if anyone does know what I do here, I don't just got updated. But basically, I manage our strategic partnerships.

So that includes our relationships with, you know, Western Digital. It includes our influencers. partners like Tinnatatman Courage and even our licensing that we've done in the past. So we recently released the My Hero Academia cases, the last one with you called Rivals that had Bakugo and Deku on it. But yeah, so our relationship with Western Digital. I mean, I guess, you know, maybe you can explain it best of like how we've been working together these last few years. But, you know, a lot of it is to help with our pre-build gaming PC business, BLD, and really make sure that we're giving customers some of the best products.

Yeah, I mean, Wes, you pretty much answered it, right? Obviously, with the BLD kind of side of the business, pre-built systems, that's something that we worked very close together, not only on the obviously WD Black products, but WD Blue as well, right? But I think what's been great in terms of working with you guys as partners is really kind of launching products, but also leading the way in terms of, hey, when we have something that we want to show you and getting your feedback in terms of performance and in terms of maybe what directions should we head,

even marketing, joint marketing efforts, right? You know, we've done a lot in the past as well. So it's been an amazing partnership and I, you know, I can't see it being any less with, you know, obviously, NXT, the brand and the, the, how renowned you guys are in the, you know, the hardware business and the PC business. So, yeah, it's something that I've truly enjoyed. And I know the W Black team is truly grateful to be kind of here and with you guys. Yeah, I think my favorite thing we partnered up on was one of the Game Awards a few years ago

where you gave away a pretty cool PC. Yeah. And you guys have been involved with the Game Awards the last couple years, right? Which that sounds pretty awesome. How did you get involved with that? I actually don't remember. I think it was literally a general conversation with our ex-vP. and Jeff Keely, and we just had a conversation and we said,

hey, we should do something. And it just became as simple as that. And, you know, the other partnership that we did was also the battlefield, you know, the battlefield launch as well, 2042. And it's funny because I actually have the gold drive that we designed here from the game. Wow. And the story behind this is that, you know, when we were kind of doing all the marketing around that,

they gave us kind of an insider look of what the game was. would be. And there was a gold drive in one of the hazard zones platforms or the maps in there. And we asked if we can get the 3D file. I say, hey, let's just ask. I say, hey, can I get the 3D file of that and just make a physical drive? And they gave it to us. And we made a few hundred of them. We gave them out. And until this day, it's still, this is like one of like 200. And it actually is a working product. And it's 2,000 megabats a second for a drive. So, So it's extremely fast for an external. So it's actually a working drive.

Only maybe 200 people have it. But who knows where it's going to be one day? I don't know. I'm sure we all know about that game. The marketing was outstanding. It was amazing. Yes. Yeah, but yeah, it was the partnerships with, you know,

even with the game awards being the official storage partner, W. Black being the official storage partner. And last year, you know, announcing our commercial with Paul Joel. from the LA Clippers. It's all been kind of, our brand has just all been just skyrocketing.

It's been amazing to have people reach out to us and say, hey, I've been using your products all my entire life. I'm sure you guys, I'm sure you guys get a ton of community. I saw the post that you did, Mike, with the mannades, maybe. If he wants to kind of slather himself with mannades, that's completely up to you.

If you want to agree to that, but I'm not saying the community needs to see that. I'm just saying that they won't stop it if it came out. So, yeah. We'll see. We'll see. I've gone weirder messages in the past of people asking what they could do for a free PC. So honestly, slathing yourself in mayonnaise is probably like one of the more tame ones that I've seen.

So keep it up with that. Yeah, you guys should make a case that has like some mayo branding on there at this point. And, you know, kudos to that guy for thinking of it. Honestly, I would love, I would love like a comment. condiment PC, like line, like case line, where it's just like, you know, mustard or relish or mayonnaise or ketchup or something like that. I would absolutely love that. Yeah. Maybe on April 1st.

You could do something then. Sounds like, you know, sounds like a good summer release. So we're out the way until next year. The condiment line. Yeah, it's perfect. Relished. Yeah. Green one.

I actually did kind of want to talk a little bit about the external drive that you talked about. we've actually been seeing a lot of people post especially for me on social i've been seeing a lot of people post using people using physical external drives for like consoles and PCs in general actually one of my friends literally has like a like a big hard drive like an eight terabyte hard drive and just sits on top of his like PC do you see like you guys i know most of the times when people think of like SSDs they think of like you know throwing into the actual motherboard into the md out too, but do you actually see more people using external drives in the future? Oh, absolutely. I think you would, you technically almost have no choice, right? When it comes to consoles, besides our, you know, our latest PS5 drive being inside PS5, you know, we still have a lot of external drives that gives you, you know, 2 to 4 terabytes or even 5 terabytes of storage for your consoles, right?

And I use it for even with my Xbox and PS5, I still have an external attached to it, including the internals. I have both, right, because you can play your old generation games and I just have a whole library for it. So you can directly play off those drives. And, you know, that's something that we recommend to everybody when they're running out of storage is that's something you can easily go to any local retail and just pick it up, right? because we're in pretty much all of them. And it's easy to get. Plug it in. It takes about three to five seconds to format,

and you're basically good to go. And you can play all your games off of that, right? Obviously, all the current gens you need to make sure you're using, you know, an actual SSD or M.2 that is rated to play. But, of course, we already have that drive, the official license drive for it. So for us, we kind of cover all bases. We even have people that play directly on the PC.

I mean, we all have M.2s, but how many slots do you really have, right? You maybe have two, and you go into 2.5 inches, and you have an HD. So you eventually will run out of space, and you will need more storage. And this is something I tell everyone is that it's guaranteed that content is going to be larger. It's not going to get smaller. You're always going to need storage. You're always going to need a backup for your backup. So I truly recommend everybody to always, you know, not only have internal storage,

but have an external storage to back up everything that's in your internal, right? We actually have a rule called the 321 backup rule. And this is not something we really share with everybody, but we're going to make it more public is try to backup on, you know, potentially three devices. It could be your local, could be two externals, maybe one in the cloud, you know, and then back it up in two different locations. And then make sure you always have potentially a one-neutral.

master backup as well. But yeah, for us, if you think about it, you could potentially lose something. A drive could fail, right? But, you know, even though we have a five-year warranty and we have people on Reddit all the time sharing us with us, like, their hard drive or their SSD compared to their dad or grandfather's hard drive, that's how long we've been in the business. And that's how long a lot of people have used our hard drives, right? 10 plus years even longer. So it's still working, it's still, people are still using it, right? You build a new PC, let's say you have a 2.5 inch. You're going to take that 2.5 inch and put it into your new PC. You're not going to be like, you know, I'm not going to utilize this extra 1 terabyte, you know, you're going to keep building.

It's just going to keep stacking. So I don't know. It's just something that it's always going to carry with you and you're always going to need more storage until it's time where, you know, I'm going to consolidate this all into a, you know, a huge drive. But, you know, as PC, you know, PC enthusiasts in players, we will always kind of transfer that into a new PC build for sure. So. Three, two, one.

I really like, I really like that rule actually. Because honestly, I don't even do that much either. Like, I have, like, I basically put blind trust

into my hard drives right now. If any one of these fails, it isn't going to be so hot for me. So honestly, that's a very smart rule to have back. for even the backups as well. Correct. I should ask my buddy about that rule.

So my best friend used to work for West Indira a long time ago on like Apple, like, you know, like iOS software for like controlling like your media center stuff. But he is the one guy I know who has like just terabytes and terabytes of storage and runs like raids and has like multiple backups. And I mean the kind of work he does now is far from the, you know, hard drive. storage world. So I feel like that's probably the one message he took when he left was back up my stuff because I had a hard drive die on me just randomly. And yeah, I mean, I haven't bothered to look into like, I know there's sometimes recovery software where you can maybe

get into it and, you know, salvage stuff. But yeah, I lost like a lot of good stuff that I could find again and redownload. But, you know, I don't have time for that. Yeah, I mean, you know, we, I mean, we also have our own NAS product lines, right? I have a NAS at home. So not only that, I back it up through our NAS for my home, but it's just something that even content creators on Twitch where when you're streaming, like how we're streaming now, right, you also want to have a high quality 10 ADP backup, right? You're recording it.

So you can directly kind of feed that into the external storage as well so that you have a high quality kind of like a video for other content like social and TikTok and kind of YouTube so that you can cut whenever whenever and wherever you want otherwise you can get that 780p or 720p unless your partner thing yeah I mean that's like I know a lot of our you know content partners like streamers that they'll record the stuff locally and then they have like an editing team really pulling like the files as they're still streaming and making edits and that's why you see like you know, they might be playing Fortnite. There's a brand new event that just happened.

And then they have a video pop up like 30 minutes after the stream's over. And you're like, how did you do that? Yeah, it's actually a huge thing now. We get requests like that all the time where, you know, we help them even, you know, well-known influencers and streamers, they ask like, hey, how do we do this? What's the workflow? How do we make this happen? And we actually helped them set it up as well to kind of say, hey, like, this is how

you would do it, especially when you're trying to create content. So it's so important for anybody who to do this. who's trying to become a Twitch streamer or any type of influencer, you're going to need these external drives, internal drives, as much storage as possible, because like I said, content is not getting smaller, right? With AK footage,

with the amount of memes that we try to hold, like it's, you know, that alone should be a drive, right? So I don't know. But yeah, it's something that is going to be needed, right? And I truly and highly encourage everybody

to just also get a backup of whatever, everything that you have. And I don't know how many stories of people reaching out to us on social saying that, you know, oh, I lost everything or I lost my drive or whatever. And people don't actually think about storage until it's too late, right? Mike isn't going to think about it until maybe he loses it or something happens. You're going to be like, dang, I should have really backed it up, you know? But that's when you change like the rest of your life of how you actually capture storage.

But we try to encourage people to really think about what would happen if you were to lose it. It is a possibility. So, you know, it's always something where people to really think about storage until it's too late. We don't want that to happen. It's safe to say storage is the retirement plan of gaming. Yeah.

That's a good quote right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not going anywhere. I see a couple people in the chat actually are asking a little bit about the 3-2-1. Like, do you have any advice for people, like what they should do for, like, backing up in story like do you back up into like an external drive do you have like another

like a laptop using it do you have any tips for that i can tell you my personal my personal workflow is i so i have kind of like um the most recent work or projects that i do for the company um i have it on my local it automatically backs up to the cloud and i also back it up to my nas So my NAS has a, you know, a redundancy. So like it, you know, if any drive fails, it already has a backup of that backup inside that NAS. So that's kind of like, I guess, for different backups. But it can be, you can do it any way that you want.

You can cater to where you have two external drives or an internal drive as well, or your local drive. Or you can kind of utilize the cloud, right? But cloud, you only have so much storage. So I highly suggest you kind of find what works for you guys within, your budget and you know even if it's external i would still have at least two external drives to back up your backup because again anything could happen um you know in in overtime if you don't even use the drive too much could potentially you know it's just kind of just stagnant so yeah um that's just

my workflow um but that's how i back up but you guys can do any way that you want it's a matter of three different locations i also have in the cloud and the nas so i can can pull it from wherever in the world I'm at. But that's just me for my for my actual job, right? You guys don't need to do that unless you but that's just mine. Okay. You guys, you guys

heard it here folks. You honestly don't be like me. Honestly, I should probably, after this podcast, I probably should get into backing up everything because I have like at least, I think I have over 600 gigabytes of like files

for like Photoshop and any sort of like project I'm working on for premiere and everything. So honestly, I probably should back up a lot of this stuff. Yeah. It's always funny when we're, when we shoot content for like a famous celebrity

or like an influencer, obviously you guys see the final cut of like the produced video. But then we kind of sometimes even go back in time and look at some of the footage like, oh wow, this part was actually really cool. And that's actually content we kind of reclip and use. So you just never know like what can work.

even though after you're done with a project, just those old 4K footage that is still usable, right? And still interesting. Maybe it couldn't be not interesting at this time, but maybe in the future, depending on what trend or whatever it is, it could be utilized. So you just never know.

God of Death was actually has a really good question. In order to adding to the 321 rule, how often should we do a backup like every week, month, every day? So I don't personally, well, the cloud automatically backs it up for me every, every second or whenever I finish something, right? Like I said, I have kind of like a certain amount of terabytes that I have on my current projects. After I'm done with that project, I should move it over to my external drives to back it up in multiple places. I just use the current projects to automatically back up to the cloud so that I can, you know, I can grab it

whenever I want as I'm working on that. But after I'm done with the project, after a while, I kind of every month kind of back it up into my externals. I don't, I guess I should probably do it per week. But for me, potentially losing kind of like a month, isn't as bad as losing my life's work, right? Which I've lost my life's work before, you know, like 10 years worth of work. So that's when I said, you know what?

I'm going to back up all my hard drives. And it was always Western Digital drives. I always had the My Books or WD hard drives. So Western Digital has always been my drive. And I didn't even know it, right? And the funny thing about Western Digital is that we're everywhere and people don't really see it. Because we're so, we're in so many places. Every time you need a drive, go to Target or something, yeah, it's there, you know.

And a lot of people don't know that Western Digital also owns Sandisk, right? We own Sandisk as well. And when you think of photography, you think of all that, we're literally everywhere. But we're so common to the point where everybody's life that we don't know that storage is so important. But because it's so easy and accessible, yeah, we're trying to educate people as much as possible. So yeah, that's just my mind. I'm pretty sure you're in like every video game thing I have. My PC, you're in my switch.

Yeah. You're in, you know, I have, I was reaching back to my PS5 because I do have like a W. black like storage drive that used to use on my PS4. Yeah. I think it's like wedged underneath the system right now. So I was like, oh, I'll pass on that. But yeah, it's funny. I remember when we rebrand the WD black brand and the drive for the heat sink,

you know, people are like, I would say storage is one of the last things you maybe get for when you're building a PC, right? You do your CPU, you do your GPS, everything, right? And then storage is like the last, almost the last one. But at the end of the day, where are you going to start? store everything. You have to have storage, right? And a comment came was like, you know, can you make storage sexy? That was the actual quote or the actual question. And when we released our W. Black brand and our drives are like, wow, I think you actually did it. It actually looks really good.

And, you know, I think the way it looks is just as important as the way it performs, right? People want to show off their PCs. People want to show off their builds, you know, just like it's like building a car. You want to show off every single part that's inside. It's either you know or you don't. And if you know, you're proud of, you know, what it is and you want to share with everybody. So, and that's how we kind of built the W. Black brand, the way it looks that, you know, even if maybe there's like small percent of somebody actually looks at it, we want it to look good when they do show it off, when they do talk about it. So to us, it's a, it's more of a lifestyle now. It's not just a brand. It's a lifestyle. We want to make sure we do that as well.

I like that. And to kind of go into a little bit about like SSDs and HDDs, like I know there are people out there that, like you said, they kind of skim on the storage at the end. Like they will rather get a really BVCPU GPU and then pay like $80 for like a big block of an HDD. Is it worth gaming on an SSD versus like a very cheap hard drive? Like is there a difference that you notice? Yeah, I mean, it's a huge difference. I mean, I'm sure there's people who are in lobbies where all your friends have loaded in and you're kind of like still loading and your friends on Discord are saying like,

hey, why are we still waiting? Who hasn't loaded in yet? And you're like, you don't want to say anything. You're kind of there. It's not that it's not that playing on a hard drive is bad. Nothing wrong with that, right? Because you can still play off of a hard drive. Absolutely.

It's still amazing. And I still use it once in a while when it comes to my, the games that are just kind of archived. but for me in terms of like the low times and kind of like the reliability of the drives and it's something that is important to me here's an example long long time ago I was playing you know CSGO off of a hard drive

and let's just say you get kicked off of one of the matches when you're playing you know competitive you have to boot up your your PC and you have to kind of reload the hard drive by that point it's actually too much time before you go back into the match so you get banned basically. Right?

So there's actually a time frame of how long all that takes. But when I was playing off SSD, I was able to jump in without a problem. I'm not sure if any bouses had that problem, but that is one of the cases of like what that happened to me where I didn't want to get kind of like, you know, dinged for not wanting to play.

I did want to play. It's just that just took me too long to boot up everything and the game and the PC. So yeah, that is obviously something that is not a case. for everybody. But there was another article when Final Fantasy Online, they specifically said our WD Black drives perform the best when it came to kind of like the MMRP.

And there's a lot of use cases there as well in terms of like obviously SSDs, M.2s versus kind of hard drives. But to each their own, I'm not saying that, hey, don't play off a hard drive. You can absolutely do it. But, you know, for competitive games for me, I like to play off of an SSD for sure. Yeah, I think I was talking to Mike about this the other day about hard drives.

It's like, you know, like the new consoles, the PS5, the Xbox, they, you know, they have faster storage now. They have, like, in about two drives. There's some really cool features. Like Xbox has that, like, quick-resume feature that I don't think is possible without that kind of storage. It always seemed like, you know, consoles were holding back PC gaming because they had slower drives.

And if a game was designed to run on, like, both platforms, you know, it was designed with things like loading elevators and mass effects. because your PC could load it real fast if you had an M.B.D.2, but your Xbox 360 was running off something a lot slower at the time. But so I guess do you see like gaming evolving more because of, you know, this like the widespread, you know, usage now of faster storage? Yeah, I see kind of, you know, you see all kind of graphical elements, visuals, everything kind of like, you know, always getting better. more realistic. It's only a matter of time where when is it, are we going to hit the end?

Like where maybe VR, AR, everything kind of mixed in together to where now we cannot physically tell if we're playing a game or not. Maybe that would be kind of like the graphical end at that point. But, you know, storage will be just that much more important. We also work with a lot. WD. Black also works with a lot of 3D designers and 3D game renderers doing real like motion capture.

putting those huge rigs for like Hollywood and celebrities and any movie that you see has to kind of pull from storage as well right so with all those kind of like assets pulling from an SSD these are like extremely huge resolution files that have to be constantly

pushing you know with the Unreal Engine and with everything all at once right and you're not going to pull that from a hard drive it's going to be from you know the fastest stores that you can get And a lot of people don't know that a lot of our storage M.2s, we actually create our own NAND, we have our own factory, our own chips, everything from beginning to end is all us, right? While, say, you know, somebody, you know, Mike, you mentioned about skimping on storage.

I'm sure you can find a cheaper drive, maybe a drive, maybe not as well known or not have a longest history as ours, or potentially a brand that maybe you'd maybe not have a cheaper drive. never heard of. And I always kind of question people. I say, would you ever drive a car from a brand you never heard of, right? You would never do that. Would you trust your, your storage, in your life with a brand that you've never heard of, right? And I think with that history and with our warranty, and we also offer data recovery now as well. So if you lose something, we can help you recover it. So that's something that we offer with a lot of our products. And that's something that

it's a peace of mind not only the 3-21 backup rule but the peace of mind that hey there's a five-year warranty with our drives with our SSDs um and it's something that kind of you know it's from a brand that's been around for a long long time and you know if we if we don't know how to do storage by now then i don't know what we're doing right we're 50 we're 51 plus years old and it's just kind of like yeah we should know everything by now so i you know buy from a brand that you trust and i would say that you know we've been in the longest in the game, so. I'm still trying to think like

what you guys were making 51 years ago. Was it like those giant reels that you would see in those huge like, yeah. It's, I sure what they're even called, but like the magnetic storage drives.

Yeah, magnetic storage. You can go to, you know, Westerndigit.com. There's actually kind of like a timeline of innovation. We also created the flash drive, right?

So the flash drive, any SSD, that's us as well. but there's a history back there where at one point we used to make motherboards long, long time ago, like in the beginning, before we came, you know, focused on storage. So PCs and kind of like where that history is, it's been ingrained into our life since the beginning, right? Of course, we don't make that anymore, but storage is where we focus on. But, yeah.

Who made the zip disk? Zip disc? I don't know. I just remember those being like all the rage when I was. I was like, oh, I'm going to do myself. And I was in some sort of schooling still. Yeah, yeah. I remember that. Yeah.

The, what was that? There's like floppies and there was something else. It was a big square one. I can't really remember. But yeah. Yeah. Mike has no idea what we're talking about, man. I do not.

He's way too young. But I am pulling up a picture from the 1950s of what are the first hard drives you guys made. And there's a person. standing. Yeah. And it's like, it's literally like a whole wall. And I bet this was probably this like huge thing was probably like what. Yeah.

Like 100 megabytes or at that point. Not even. Maybe one megabyte if that. You know, I don't know the exact number. But, you know, I ask the chat. Like what is like the smallest capacity that you've had when you started out, right? I mean, I think back of people having flash drives that were, I don't know, but it's like not even like a gig. It was like 100 megabytes or 50 or 500 megabytes.

It's like we all have that stories of where we, or that story where we started. And to see that an M.2 now holds, you know, four terabytes easily at like such a small footprint. It's insane. And it's only going to get smaller, right? our Sandus micro SD cards, you know, have like one terabytes that you can add into your Nintendo switch or any product, you know, the Steam Deck. So it's just kind of like, it's just crazy how small the footprint is and what that technology is kind of going. Of course, you know, without divulging anything. I mean, who knows? Who knows where it's going to go?

I think my first hard drive, the first one I bought was like 20 gigabytes. Might have been 20. Yeah, 20 was. being like crazy in like the early 2000s. Yeah, was it like a, like a, wait, at that point it was probably like compact or like gateway PCs or something. My first PC was that I bought was definitely a gate, was a gateway. Yeah. Gateway was mine.

Yeah. I think it came with like, I think it came with like four gigs or something of storage and I quickly ran out of that after like installing Half Life and Quake and stuff like that. And that was also the boom of MP3. like the whole like Napster era so I was quickly running out of room. These were the struggles Mike. Okay, you guys have no idea what we had to go through. Oh yeah.

Okay, 56K, all that stuff. Okay, we had to go through that era. Yeah, I see, I see Mr. Matt Lee says that he had, and I actually do remember me having like a red USB flash ride. Mr. Matt's was 16 megabytes. I don't think there's that much out there that could be 16 megabytes. It's like I've had emails that were more than 60 micabytes before. Like, can you imagine having your entire life on this little drive that we can't even fathom like how tiny it is now?

That's really one raw file from your camera, right? If even. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just crazy to think about it's just crazy to think about how we've advanced, especially in storage and innovation that we've achieved. in this time frame.

It's pretty crazy. But excited to see for the, you know, what's coming up in the future for sure. Actually, kind of going along with that, do you guys have anything in the future for WD, like any cool plans? I don't want you to leak anything, but anything you guys can say?

Plans, I mean, for WD Black, I won't say in terms of hardware stuff. I can talk about, you know, upcoming events, the things that we're going to be attending. So we will be going to Evo. next weekend in Las Vegas. So if you guys are there, we'll be doing a lot of huge giveaways. Our booth is going to be right next to Sony.

So you guys can kind of see us there, of course, with our Sony partnership, with our latest drive. But we're going to be doing a ton of giveaways. We're an official sponsor of the entire event. So, yeah, we have a few special guests. I don't want to say who because they don't want it to be named just yet, because it might call is like a mass hysteria. But I strongly recommend if you guys are there to come by our

booth. We're doing a lot of giveaways, a lot of product, a lot of things where you guys would do as well. So, yeah. They're going to have the Ryu from Street Fighter. Yeah. In real life? Actually, you might actually be hitting on something, but I can't say too much. Somebody may be messed up as Ryu, so.

I'm jealous. I can't attend this year. I've gone a lot of the previous years. Competed for fun. Never made it out. made it like two fights in maybe at most never out of a bracket not that good um but yeah it's like the wedding of the century for my family that next weekend so i'm on uh i'm on major family duty yeah i get it man i get it yeah to sneak away for like five 10 hours it's only a four-hour drive right so they won't know they won't notice they won't know this three and a half if i floor it yeah yeah they won't have Oh, yeah, did you want to go a little bit into the PlayStation partnership that you guys just talked about?

Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, I think that is something that we always were a part of, right? Obviously, we were in discussions with Sony, you know, since the beginning in terms of when that M.2 slot was going to be kind of activated, right? Obviously, we were there since to have those conversations. And, you know, we knew exactly when it was going to launch, when it was going to be released, in terms of how you can update your software. But we just found that the partnership with Sony. What Sony did was so amazing that it kind of put a product that PC gamers always knew, right?

M.2s into the mindset of a console gamer, which they had no idea. Like they would really, I mean, I wouldn't say they wouldn't. There's a lot of cross gamers. But a lot of time, you would never have to worry about that as a console gamer. It was always you plug in your externals and you're kind of all set, right? It was all into one sweet package. But with this great partnership, we created the first official, you know, licensed drive for Sony and the PS5. And installation is easy, especially if you're a PC gamer.

Obviously, you pop it off, you screen the M.2 screw. That's it. It took 10, 15 seconds. But there's, I'm still, there's still a lot of hesitation and fear for anybody who has never done that before. And the hardest part is really just popping off the side panel, which once you do that, it's as simple as popping in, you know, any other drive and put, you know, screwing any other screw. So with that, it only took about 10, 15 seconds for anybody who's never done it before. So it's effortless to install. We had a lot of influencers talk about that as well.

It's extremely easy. So don't be afraid to actually pop it open. If you were one of the lucky few to actually get a PS5, you know, don't be afraid to pop off the side and, you know, utilize our. drive. It's already kind of optimized and ready for you to install. And within like 15, 30 seconds, it formats. You're good to go. You can store. You can play. It's extremely simple. Yeah. Opening the PS5 is the easiest and like scariest thing I've ever done. It's like you just pull, but it's like, you feel like if you're pulling just on the wrong area, I'm like, am I going to break this? That is a fear. Because it looks so fragile, right? Yeah. It comes off. I even, they sold like the

replacement covers. So I made my mind. Mine, mine's all black now, you know, to go with that WG black. Yeah, that's awesome. Even those are sold out, right? Like, even those are hard to get. And yeah, I think a lot of people are afraid because they think, one, it took them forever to get a PS5, right? Nobody wants to break it.

But the way it looks at has, like, the thin panels, it's actually pretty sturdy. So I don't believe you can break it. But again, I'm not Sony. Don't, don't put me on that. But it didn't, it wasn't hard. Like I said, 10, 15 seconds, you're pretty much radio. go. Yeah, super easy.

I mean, almost, you know, basically just as easy as sticking it, like, on a motherboard. You know, just generally just pop it in and one screw to hold it down. Exactly. Yeah, I will say that it was crazy that it, you know, it took so long to kind of get that that slot activated on a PS5. Like, I almost felt like I was beta testing my PS5 for the first, like, few months until that kicked in. But, you know, it's definitely, it's an awesome feature to give consumers, like, the choice.

of what to put in there. Like the Xbox is pretty cool too. It's really neat how you just plug it in like a card, but because it's proprietary, it's pretty expensive. Yeah. Open competition is always good. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, like I said, the W. Black brand is like, you know, we're agnostic for any type of console, hardware, PC, etc. And our goal is always to include, include every type of gamer, every type of console or hardware to where no matter how you play your games, we have a product that works perfectly for that system. Right. So, and for us, at least for myself, I play everything. I play PC, console, switch, mobile. I literally play everything to where I feel like that's a lot of the gamers out there. We play everything. So we wanted to make sure this brand has a product no matter where you want to play and no matter where you want to game. So. I think we have, we've definitely achieved that. Let's see. I guess, I guess we, there are a couple of questions from chat that,

actually, or I do want to see if we can answer real quick before we run too much at a time. Let's see. From Jackson was Laxon, Jackson was Laxon. Michael, if you were a WD product, what product would you be and why? That's the Jackson from our team, by the way, our stream. so he's going to troll me. In terms of product, I would say I'm the SN-750,

the last-gen product. The being because, you know, just from where we started and from where we kind of began with the rebrand, I put the most hard, not saying I don't put heart into anything that we do, it's just that that was the most important to me because that was kind of the relaunch of everything

and that's where everything kicked off. And to the point where even that brand, we were trending on Twitter. We were number one in USA. We were like within PACS South. So that whole launch was kind of like a Cinderella story. It kind of just came out nowhere, and that drive kind of swept everyone, right?

So, yeah, I would say SN-750, just humbling myself and not saying the latest and greatest. I like it. Yeah. Great question, Jackson. also from Ask Austin 6 can we get a comparison of gaming on for example like a WD Blue versus a green versus a black

we'd love to hear like a little bit more about how like W Black is more gaming optimized yeah we have um you know besides the actual specs of it all right obviously the speed different different drives uses potentially different NAND as well and then we when using WD Black, there's actually a game mode in there that is automatically turned on so that there's no throttling when it comes to heat or anything like that. So you're always running at an

optimal kind of like performance. And that's kind of the difference between a lot of these drives, right? Like keep in mind, you can you can technically use any drive to play. But it does come down to the spec and the speed and the endurance of some of the drives as well. So, yeah, you invest in what you think it's worth. So, yeah, you pay for it. Wes, you want to ask some of the questions from chat? Oh, you're muted. Let's say, go ahead and grab the next one because I have not been looking at chat.

Oh, you're good, you're good. God of Deathless has asked, just wondering, will we ever see end of life for physical mechanical storage, like floppy disk or everyone, and everyone moves to use only SATA and NVME? Yeah, that's a great question. If you think about it, you know, Western Digital, you know, we have such a well-known product, you know, hard drives and businesses and everything that you guys utilize today. I can't say which streaming platforms, but we're the reason why you're able to stream, right? That's where it's stored.

Like, they all have to go up into cloud with gaming servers and things like that. I think in terms of the hard drive, I think where it's going to be here, for a very, very long time. If anything, we just announced our 22-terabyte hard drive technology. We're the first in the world that high of a capacity. It's not getting any smaller. It's going to continue to be utilized. For gaming, I would say NVMEs and SSDs for sure is going to be shifted.

But the same time, like I said, I still archive all my games that I don't play often on my hard drive. It's still always going to be utilized because as a PC gamer, anybody who builds a PC, you don't just 100% play games. I mean, you're going to use it for work, you're going to use it for school. So, yeah, you're going to utilize the way that works for your life. So I would say we have a very, very long lifespan in terms of hard drives. I think we still need it even more than ever now. I think because Western Digital has both, it makes us a very, very unique company that we can kind of,

I wouldn't say dominate the space, but I would say that we have quite a bit of uses for for all of our drives. You said 22 terabytes, right? Yep, we just announced that. So is the goal to add like one terabyte a year from now on? Yeah. No, it's going to jump up quite a bit, actually. We're not going to do one terabyte a year.

Technology advances best. That jokes here. 22 terabytes for 2022. Yeah. That was kind of the slogan for some people that wrote on there, like, you know, 22 and 2022. But yeah, it's not one terabyte a year. Who knows what our next capacity is going to be.

D2 terabytes. Oh my God. I can't even imagine. Yeah, I can't imagine how much, like, how much files you would need to fill up a 22 terabyte storage. I don't know. We have a one hole. That's always kind of like the joke where.

And it's funny because when we released our Call of Judy branded drives, right, people are like, wow, they actually did it. They actually made the drive that holds, Call of Duty, like just the entire kind of like DLC, everything. Yeah. So it wasn't a meme, right? But it kind of, we played off of it still. It made sense,

honestly. I've seen those, I've seen the updates in those games. Those are ridiculous sometimes. Yeah. Let's see. I guess we'll do this last question from chat, and it will go into a little bit of rapid fire before we end off the podcast.

Cool. I have a question. Does WD make NVME SSD enclosures? love to make internal, an external device? Not currently, but that's a good question. Yeah, that's what I was looking at. I was like, that's very interesting to make, instead of having an external drug, you make an SSD into one. I was like, that's very interesting.

You know, this is something that we've partnered before, right, with ASUS that makes external enclosures. You know, that's not something we currently do. We don't make a lot of accessories, but it seems like that could be something that, who knows? Who knows what the future would be. But right now we just want to make sure that our drives, what we currently focus as a business, is top tier, right?

And we'll work with the partners that are currently doing it. But yeah, that's a great question. Maybe something to think about. Awesome. All right. We're going to go straight into the rapid fire questions. Basically, answer however you like, but these are just more fun, get to know you kind of questions

and kind of like who you are as a person. So I guess we'll start off with the first one. What is the game you've never played but wish you did? Oh man, a game I've never played. I wish I did. I never played the Escape from Tarkov. I've never played that game. Oh, you never played Tarkov?

It takes a lot. I'm too busy with Apex, yeah. Understandable. It just takes so much to get into it, but once you do, it's... Yeah. I never played either. Yeah. It's just, you have to sink, like, hours into the game

in order to like... You only have so much time. Exactly. I play the games that I know that I'm going to focus on and try to be good at. And then along with that, what is your least favorite game that you've ever played? One that didn't meet your expectations.

Least favorite game. I have kids. So I play a game called Humans Fall Flat. I play that game because of my kids. But the mechanics of how wobbly their hands are, everything how we used to like react if you are with every other game that was by far the hardest and most frustrating frustrating game to play right you're basically wobbling everything and like you're trying to hold things up but i would say that's a game that i i'd bite my

my tongue on when i'm playing with my kids it's uh it's fun and also the most frustrating game understandable very understandable i mean that's kind of like the point of it's just like you just try lifting something up but then you end up falling out you're like come on man yeah yeah yeah yeah Cool. So the next question, if you could remake one game, what would that game be? And would it just be like updated graphics or would you like change things up? Oh man. That's tough. I would say Ocaryana of Time would be it. Or I mean, yeah. It's a classic on its own. It's almost like I don't want to remake it. But if there was like a remake, I would like to make it. I would like to see how that would be. be. I don't know. Kind of like the Final Fantasy 7 remake, like kind of like fresh coat of paint for the next gen. Nice.

But they change the story a little bit, but it's, yeah, but still. A little bit. We'll see. I feel like that one's going to be a lot of bit pretty soon. Yeah, it was a lot at the end. But yeah, yeah. I didn't want to spoil anything for anybody. I'll do that. I don't know. You had plenty of time. I'm just kidding. I'm sorry. Cool. Underrated game people should play? Underrated game. To be honest, yeah, I don't know how to answer that one. Honestly, I'm still stuck on the games that I'm playing now.

I wouldn't say I'm the best person to kind of speak up on that, I guess. Okay. How about, is there something you wish you were good at, or perhaps something you could be better at instead? Oh, competitive gaming. Like, I just know for a fact I don't have the reactive and cognitive skills anymore. and something I wish I would have known when I was younger that I can get paid a lot playing games

and being famous for playing games and being a streamer. I would have worked very, very hard to get to that point. But it's way too late for me now. And I definitely don't have the skills to be a competitive gamer. Like, just pure reactions and cognitive skills. Like, at my hands, there's just not,

I just don't have the dexterity to do any of those things anymore. What game would you want to be professional in? I don't know, man. CSGO, I sank around 1,500 hours in that for sure. And I'm still not good. So, like, yeah, I'm not the person they can speak upon. But I played when CSGO came out, not when I came out. I will play every morning before I went to work.

And I will play every night when I came home from work. And, yeah, I played, I woke up at like 6.30 a.m. to play. So I love that game so much. But I'm just not good, you know. say. It's fun game though. Yeah, I'll never be pro. Same with Ballarat.

I'll never be pro. I still enjoy it. Next question. Would you rather fight a chicken to death every time you've gone into a car or fight a chimpanzee to death once a year but you get a sword? Wait,

every day before I got into the car? Yeah, so every time you try to get into a car you would have to fight a chicken or once a year you have to fight chimpanzee, but you get a sword. I would do a chimpanzee for sure. You do chimpanzee? The reason being is that I want to put all my effort into that one,

and once that's done, I can move on with my life. Can you imagine a hard day's worth of work or wherever you are doing? Every time you get into the car, you have to fight a chicken. I know it's probably not that hard, but it's going to weigh on you and it's going to get annoying real fast. So, I don't know, chimpanzee for sure. But you might, you know, you can get a chicken dinner every night, right? That's a whole different story, but my grandparents used to have a chicken farm.

So for chickens for me, I've, yeah, I've gone through that. You've gone through that. It's a different story. All right. Next question. Would you rather be able to slow down time by 10% or run twice as fast? I would run twice as fast. I would run twice as fast.

It's slowing down things 10%. But what But I can But I can But I'm That's true But running twice as fast I can pretend

I'm slow Still right While everybody else is normal Yeah It's you have the capacity To run You know If you can sprint

15 miles Or you could sprint 30 Yeah I would rather do that Because if I slow down time That means I'm literally Waiting for the world Right

The world Kind of like Yes I'm I would be that much faster But You know I can live Life in a normal time

I guess I like that Yeah and then I guess next quote Do you have any tips for someone who would want to work in You know this gaming industry How did you know Best ways to get in I

So I just for me personally Like then this is not only for the gaming issue But for any job like you know And this is cliche to say But you know you really need to enjoy what you do You really need to enjoy it And you'll find the success And the success will come from it

I think if you are trying to to chase the success without enjoying your job. You're only going to do it for so long before you realize, I hated this. I don't ever want to do this anymore. And you kind of look back and say, oh, that spent five years on this. I could have actually potentially done something, maybe created a business, maybe created a, you know, a game publishing company. And you're that much, you're that much more behind because you wasted those five years, not doing what you love. And now you're finally starting.

So I truly believe that to find, out what you enjoy and you know really focus your passion on it because you'll you will be successful by doing that and you will find that it passes the time so quickly that you'll never even think that it's really work so yeah that's what my advice would be it's good that's that's great advice everyone so you guys want to get into gaming industry that's that's some good advice right there and i guess for the last question it's a little deep but you can answer however you wish is are you happy yeah Yeah, I'm extremely happy.

I can say that everything that has led up to this point in my life, I'm extremely content with all the decisions and everything that happened. Good or bad, right? Some of the businesses that I've worked in the past, some ideas that failed, I lost a few million dollars for that company or whatever product, but I learned from it and made the next product more successful. You know, along with following your passion,

And it's like, just learn from yourself. Continue doing that. And you will be very, very happy. Don't just give up on something that maybe is challenging or potentially think that, oh, this is maybe the lowest part of, you know, your life. There's ways to kind of like make sure that you kind of better everything. So yes, I am extremely happy and content with my life. That.

Love that. And I guess we're going to go ahead and start going into. the closing part of the podcast. Do you have any last words, shoutouts, anything you guys want to say? Yeah, so, you know, besides being part of this stream, my team and sometimes myself,

we also stream every single Thursday. So we're streaming today at 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time at Twitch.tv slash WD underscore Black. So you guys can go to that. We give away products every single week or every time we stream. I'm not sure what product we're given away. I think last we gave away like a SN770, one terabyte.

But we always are giving way either an external drive, internal drive, swag products, et cetera. So there's been people who win multiple times, right? But yeah, the chances are really high when you actually watch. You can win a product. And we get those shipped out. But yeah, if you guys have been followed us already, please follow our social handles, WD underscore Black,

on Instagram and Twitter. for Facebook it's wd black gaming but yeah find us on all the social platforms and oh yeah we're also on tic-tok but we just started that so wd underscore black i'll make sure to follow you guys too and we can have some fun with uh with ourselves i'll make sure to follow guys um and i think that's it

any other announcements before i go into mine no yeah again if you guys are in las vegas going to evo please check out our booth we're doing a lot of giveaways we also make all of our swag I handpick every single shirt that, not every single shirt, but every shirt that we use to make. I picked like the softest, softest shirts that I want to make sure people are able to wear it, be comfortable, etc. So we make a lot of swag, jackets, et cetera. But yeah, be sure to go there so you can get some of those things as well.

Mike is inspector number two. You'll see his initials in the shirt. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I guess we'll go into my announcements. I'll just go to these real quick. We just released the signal capture cards. So if you want to check it out, go ahead and take a look at the NZXT signal.

We also, like West said earlier, we have the rivals case, which is our collaboration with My Hero Academia. So if you guys also want to take a look into that, go ahead and take a quick peek into that. And the finale, what a lot of people here are waiting for is what is we so for to let everyone know for those that are listening to the podcast. We do a secret code to, you know, keep people interested in the Twitch stream during the time. So the free code for the 500 entries is free SSD, please. That is the code. It's free SSD, please, spelled out, please is spelled out P-L-E-A-S-E, and no spaces. That's for Mike right here for W-D-Block.

So that is the code. Go ahead, type that in. You guys will get 500 entries. for those saying here. Thank you. Thank you. That's, I was hoping

that some people will like the code. So thank you guys. And I think that is it. Do you want, do you have any closing remarks, Mike? Anything at all? No.

Just, you know, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. And honestly, it's always great to be here and working with you guys. You guys have been amazing partners. And, you know,

we love following everything you do and always being huge advocates for us. So we really appreciate it. And yeah, just thank you. Yeah, no problem. I mean, likewise. And we can't wait to see what you guys, you know, have a plan for the rest of the year.

Yeah. Actually, yeah, seriously, thanks for coming out to the podcast with us. We love having everyone on. And please, if you want to do another one, let us know. Yeah, of course. Yeah, just let me know, whatever time works. So in the chat says, thanks, Mike, you look young for a 54-plus-year-old man. Yeah.

I didn't want to divulge my age, but thank you. All right. Thank you guys for joining us. Remember to tune in live every Thursday on the official NZXT Twitch. And don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. And please leave us a positive review if you like what you hear. And if you didn't. Got any questions for us?

Send an email to podcast at nzxte.com or tag at NZXT on social media platforms. See you guys.