Western Digital spins up a USB disk just for the Raspberry Pi Western Digital's WDLabs has spun up a hard disk just for the Raspberry Pi 3. The “PiDrive” has a capacity of 314 gigabytes is just 7mm tall and looks, per the picture above (here for readers on our mobile site) to boast just a single platter. It's a USB affair, connectivity-wise, but WD says it has tweaked the device so “... …
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The drive's also keenly priced at just US$31.42 in the WD store. By the time you get the requisite cables and cases, that price balloons
So you are assuming that punters who buy this won't:-
- Have a USB Cable? Is WD using a proprietary USB connector?
- Have a case that can't be 'bodged' into accepting this drive?
Isn't the Pi aimed at hobbyists and schools? I would have thought that this drive is not much use to schoold but to hobbyists building a Media Device it is right up their street. The DIY'ers I know with Pi's will have cases that can be 'engineered' to let this drive work.
so what is missing then that makes the price Baloon? How big is the baloon? Is it more than the proce of the drive?
Is WD using a proprietary USB connector?
The pic shows standard micro-USB3.0. Or at least something that looks like it.
Isn't the Pi aimed at hobbyists and schools?
Exactly. Only a hobbyist will assemble "My Time Capsule" or "My CCTV system" himself. Spinning rust is still the best means of storing data for both. Yeah, I know, "real" hobbyists are supposed to take a soldering iron in hand and peruse the GPIO interface, everyone else who does not, is not worthy and should be treated as scum. I know, but I disagree - my razzies have no GPIO use at present - they all drive USB peripherals +/- an onboard camera.
Picture shows a USB3.0 connector ion the drive but the WD cable for it looks like it's got a power passthrough, so you'd plug your wall wart PSU into that first and then into the Pi.
Correct - the Pi Drive cable has 4 connectors, a micro-USB-B female (into which you plug the wall wart), a micro-USB-B male (plugs into the Pi to power it), a micro-USB3-B male (plugs into the drive) and a USB-A male (plugs into the Pi USB port for data input).
Thus you get power to both the drive and the Pi, and data connection between the two, all in one neat cable. It works very well, presuming the PSU you use has enough juice for the job to supply both. With this new drive it's not really a problem though, as it's designed to be light on current draw (measured at about 200mA when acting as the source for playback on an uncompressed BluRay - I was a beta-tester for the drive and one of my fellow testers made some in-line measurements of current draw and reported them).
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"You missed the hints."
Shame El Reg was late to press with this news story !!
It was announced on Pi-day too....how many hints does one need ??
Y'know: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609
[url]http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com/[/url]
phuzz wrote: "But yesterday was 14/3/16 (or 2016/03/14 if you want to use the more logical Japanese system), what's that got to do with Pi?"
This is the only redeeming feature of the standard American date format that I can see. It is otherwise irredeemably illogical. It also falls foul of equal opportunities legislation, discriminating as it does against other important irrational numbers like e (2.71828182846ish, try to get that regularly into any standard date format!).
Mind you, while I like eating pies on pi day I'm not sure I would want to indulge in the designated fare on an e day.
so what is missing then that makes the price Baloon? How big is the baloon? Is it more than the proce of the drive?
You need the WD drive cable, US$9.99, but out of stock (conveniently?). A USB cable, drive cable and 2-A 5-V supply run you US$16.99, and their case is another US$9.99. So you could go WD all the way for less than US$60.00. That isn't really a balloon, as it would still leave a few bucks in your pocket to cover the price of a few pints at the local saloon.
This is quite tempting to combine a Pi and a drive into a "DIY Time Capsule" to run amanda from the shed. Temptation... Temptation...
It all depends on price, as you end up having to use a USB hub for most Pi use cases anyway, a more power hungry, but cheaper USB drive may suffice. The other issue with USB drives is that Linux has no effective means of controlling the power consumption. hdparm does not work over the USB storage interface. So you are totally at the mercy of the drive firmware as far as spin-up/spin-down and actual drive power metrics are concerned.
By the way - I see a USB3.0 interface on it, while the Pi is 2.0. So the Pi angle looks more like marketing. This is a dedicated external enclosure drive - all vendors now do them with USB onboard to save costs.
hdparm for spindown works fine with the USB drive attached to my Pi model B, as it does with my desktop also. You'll see an error returned as USB doesn't seem to carry the response from the drive (my interpretation) but the command "hdparm -S 5", for example, does work fine.
yes because an SSD running from a shared USB3 connection on an ultra low cost computer makes a lot of sense.
WD already make these drives for their small USB enclosures. I needed to repair one for a friend (no connection/detection) and expected to open up the enclosure and pull a sata drive from a usb->sata block but no, the drive had the USB socket directly on the controller board. Most displeasing. the sell for this one is the 7mm height for small builds.
I seem to remember there used to be 1.8" drives in small netbooks, maybe that can make an even smaller form factor case for the PI
"Should have made it an SSD then."
TBH, a quick look on fleabay will reveal plenty of small-ish (8Gb or so) capacity SATA SSD's for around 2 cups of Costa's finest coffee - I got a couple a few days ago and they are doing very nicely :)
For the "tinkerer" in me, these are much nicer than SD cards.
Linux boots up very quickly and low power draw too. Win Win :)
I've had a Raspberry Pi B+ running off a normal Western Digital 500Mb drive for a while now, as it's at home it's plugged into a hub so power is not an issue, it's fairly straightforward to edit the DOS partition config file cmdline.txt on the SD card and copy the Linux partition to the hard disk.
Nice to see they are producing drives and interfaces specifically for the PI now though, was interested to see the SATA interface, may get one to play with.
Would be nice to have an alternative to bypass the SD card was interested by massivelySerial's comment at the top that USB boot and PXE will be possible with the PI3, thats good news indeed.
I do think that in a lot of applications the limited write endurance of the SD cards hampers long term reliability. Having the rPI crash-out until I re-image a replaced SD card.... is aggravating. A product like this drive may prevent that... or at least extend it longer than the 2 years I'm currently getting. (and when you have multiple systems... it seems one is almost always down and needing attention--and it is always the SD card in my experience... the hardware itself is, as you say, otherwise very reliable.)
I know people say, well you can do this, and do that to improve the SD card's longevity... but in my application, I can't... I have to do the writes. WD knows that there are a lot of people out there like me (SD card killers) and others that could use a low-priced-semi-customized drive. Hope it is a good seller for them.
While SD cards may not be all that they could be, pretty much any SSD has a better MTBF than any mechanical drive other than dedicated enterprise drives costing many orders of magnitude more. Better power consumption and shock resistance too for those battery powered PI projects. Buy Crucial's "BX" series if ultra-performance isn't needed (which isn't with the PI) and you're approaching mechanical drive pricing.
I stand by my wondering why anyone would want spinning rust for most applications these days when SSDs are getting cheaper and cheaper.
Because they're still not at the sweet spot in terms of price/GB compared to rust, especially at large capacities. When your routinely handle data in the TB range, the current crops of affordable SSDs just aren't cheap enough yet.
Now, I'll grant you, in the 256GB range the flash drives are now within reason (I'm noting price tags in the $50-60...and these are with USB3 plugs in case you're wondering), but as others have noted their longevity cannot be assured (after all, the chips that go into these things probably aren't first-string as those go into the SSDs).
Ahh the Winchester! My school had a 40MB one in the late 80s attached to a network of 20...yes 20! BBC computers. We used to like causing it to crash with a simple script:
10 MD <name>
20 CD <name>
30 GOTO 10
Thinking back can't remember if it as MD/CD or MKDIR/CHDIR...or maybe even something else. Still, it annoyed the hell out of our maths teacher.
Save buying an overly bright white LED desk lamp to light up your room as it rarely (ie. never - 'cept for a few flickers ever 24 seconds) turns off. WD programmers have not taken LED101 and should be reminded to invert that output.
The incessant buzzing from the drive may also keep away insects and other pests. Saving the worst til last; upgrading the BerryBoot SD reformats the Pidrive and blows away all of the multiple OS previously downloaded along with the drives content.
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