Monday, March 14

Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi

(credit: Western Digital)

The Raspberry Pi 3 was released earlier this month with some significantly improved hardware, including a quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU, an upgraded GPU, and embedded wireless—updates that will let people use it for a wider variety of tasks than before. For people whose use cases require a decent amount of storage, Western Digital has just announced a specialized low-profile hard drive called the PiDrive.

The 314GB drive, which will normally cost $45.81 but is currently available for $31.42, is a 7mm-high drive based on the basic Western Digital Blue drives that still ship in many budget and mid-end laptops and PCs. The difference is the interface, which 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 customized 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." It's also a cheaper solution than the 1TB PiDrive kit the company already sells for $79.99.

Western Digital says that the 314GB PiDrive will come with the BerryBoot bootloader to make it as easy as possible to install and run multiple operating systems from the same drive. The new PiDrive is compatible with WD's existing PiDrive cables and enclosures and is available for purchase today.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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