By Western Digital, one of the largest computer hard drive manufacturers in the world, announced this week a Raspberry Pi-focused HDD, called the WD PiDrive 314GB.
The announcement came shortly after a new Raspberry Pi was released a couple of weeks ago. This new model features updates that will let people use it for a wider variety of tasks than before. It is also the first version of the board that has the processing power to be a full-fledged PC. So, those who are looking to turn a Raspberry Pi 3 into a usable PC will probably want an external hard drive to provide additional storage.
Western Digital has cleverly provided a solution for this situation. The 314GB PiDrive has a different interface compared to other hard drives. It has been changed from SATA to USB and is designed to connect to the Pi directly, without drastically increasing the footprint of the device. WD says it has customised the drive in order to “reduce the electrical power load of the hard drive on Raspberry Pi while still maintaining sufficient performance to deliver maximum USB data transfer rate.”
“Adoption of Raspberry Pi computing devices is expanding at a tremendous rate, reaching eight million units in about four years. However, the millions of Raspberry Pi users are finding limitations from data storage devices (SD card, USB hard drive or cloud storage) originally designed for other applications,” said Dave Chew, chief engineer, WDLabs. “The WD PiDrive 314 GB HDD is designed to support Raspberry Pi growth by addressing barriers to hard drive adoption such as affordability, power loading, and system set-up. In addition, we’ve maintained the key strengths of hard drive technology, including mass-storage value, high data integrity and reliability.”
The 314GB PiDrive will come with the BerryBoot bootloader, which will make it as easy as possible to install and run multiple operating systems from the same drive. The device is compatible with WD’s existing PiDrive cables and enclosures and is already available for purchase. It will normally cost $45.81, but is currently available for $31.42. It is not clear how long the discount will last, so those of you thinking about buying the drive, should definitely act fast.
On our website, you can shop for memory cards, USB flash drives and hard drives compatible with your Raspberry Pi model.
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