Western Digital Offers Growing Raspberry Pi Community New 314GB Drive

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WDLabs™, a business growth incubator of storage solutions leader Western Digital Corporation, today announced availability of the WD PiDrive 314GB, a storage device engineered to serve the Raspberry Pi® community with low-power USB operation, affordability, reliability and ease of integration.

"Adoption of Raspberry Pi computing devices is expanding at a tremendous rate, reaching eight million units in about four years1. 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 WD PiDrive 314GB device is based on Western Digital's proven, high-volume 500GB platform with design changes made specifically for Raspberry Pi. Customizations made to the drive's magnetic recording and electrical system operating set-points align with Raspberry Pi's USB data and power design 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. Platform design flexibility and the manufacturing tuning process enabled WDLabs to create this specialized product for Raspberry Pi efficiently without compromising quality and reliability.
 
I wanna know what kind of programs that use that kind of space on a Pi
 
MrPatate said:
Weird space number for a drive, 314GB. In honor of PI day? :p
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Especially because it's reported to start life as a 500GB drive. Which means 38% of the drives raw capacity is unavailable. For what?

Are these just bad drives being salvaged?

The price is nice though when compared to a flash based solution.
 
westrock2000 said:
Especially because it's reported to start life as a 500GB drive. Which means 38% of the drives raw capacity is unavailable. For what?

Are these just bad drives being salvaged?

The price is nice though when compared to a flash based solution.
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My guess is 500GB drives with one bad side on a platter... assuming these are two platter drives. The rest would be bad sector reserved space for reallocation.
 
rat said:
My guess is 500GB drives with one bad side on a platter... assuming these are two platter drives. The rest would be bad sector reserved space for reallocation.
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Thats what I was thinking.

EDIT: Ahhh yes, here is the rough edit of the original press release

WDLabs™, a business growth incubator of storage solutions leader Western Digital Corporation, today announced availability of the partially functional WD PiDrive 500GB 314GB, a storage device engineered to salvage defective units to serve the Raspberry Pi® community with low-power USB operation, affordability, moderate reliability and ease of integration.
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The actual hard drive is pretty meh, (just a USB3 external hard drive minus the external shell) but the PiDrive enclosure/case and power cable is actually innovative. I haven't found any Pi cases made to couple up 2.5" drives. You could 3D print the case and solder your own power wiring if you have the inclination and time, but pricing wise for what WD is asking for the enclosure and cable is reasonable.
 
Just noticed this earlier today and was thinking that's a pretty cool move on WD's part, now I looked at the accessories available and was shocked at how low the pricing is. I mean really low compared to what I was expecting - $10-$17 per accessory which I find to be amazingly low considering. I would have expected WD to ream people on the accessory pricing like Apple and some other companies do. This could prove to be a nice boost for WD if things work out in the Pi pushing, so to speak.
 
I picked one up, for $30 it's a nice addition to my rpi stuff
 
FLECOM said:
I picked one up, for $30 it's a nice addition to my rpi stuff
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Do we have a regular forum for the RasPi sort of class of devices? Not sure if it goes in Small Form Factor systems or under Non AMD/Intel CPUs or the DIY/Hackable subforum. No real activity in one place that I can find when it comes to this stuff... (I really thought there would be MUCH more discussion on here about little ARM boards)

Been rocking a hacked Dockstar for the better part of 6 years and it's been an amazing little project.
 
actually, I don't know? I think maybe Non AMD/Intel would be better than SFF
 
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