WDLabs, a business growth incubator of storage solutions specialist Western Digital (WD) announced availability of the WD PiDrive 314GB, a storage device engineered to serve the Raspberry Pi community.
Featuring low-power USB operation, reliability and ease of integration, the WD PiDrive 314GB HDD is designed to support Raspberry Pi growth by addressing barriers to hard drive adoption such as power loading and system set-up.
The PiDrive 314GB device is based on Western Digital’s 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.
Platform design flexibility and the manufacturing tuning process enabled WDLabs to create this specialized product for Raspberry Pi– many operating systems and software applications can be stored on the WD PiDrive HDD and upon system boot-up, the OS can be selected from the BerryBoot menu and launched with a couple of mouse clicks.
“Western Digital is the world’s largest storage supplier and is involved across all ecosystems,” Richard Rutledge, senior vice president of marketing for WD, told eWEEK. “WDLabs was formed to engage new markets, develop new products and accelerate pilot activities. Its role as a business growth incubator naturally aligns it to exciting, new, growing ecosystems like Raspberry Pi.”
He noted the Wintel- (Windows, Intel) based PC platform has long had alternatives ranging from the Mac and long-ago platforms like Commodore Amiga.
“Raspberry Pi is illustrative of what value a LinARM (Linux, ARM) platform can bring to the market,” he explained. “It has grown from its initial education focus to include maker community, commercial products, and industrial products.”
He pointed out Raspberry Pi2 had a five-fold increase in computing power compared to Raspberry Pi1, and Raspberry Pi3 has a tenfold increase in computing power compared to Raspberry Pi1.
“Raspberry Pi3 includes much stronger connectivity across Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth,” he noted. “This increased level of compute and connectivity drives storage demand and WD is happy to apply its energies to this opportunity.”
The PiDrive 314GB HDD is compatible with all PiDrive cables, cable kits and WD PiDrive enclosures. The suggested retail price is $45.81 with a limited-time discount of 31.4 percent for a net price of $31.42.
In addition, the PiDrive 314GB HDD comes with a two-year limited warranty and is available along with PiDrive accessories through the company’s website.