Western Digital now makes a $46, 346GB Raspberry Pi specific hard drive!

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/western-digital-makes-a-46-314gb-hard-drive-just-for-the-raspberry-pi/

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."

Click to expand...

That's pretty darn cool.

Reducing electrical power load on Pi's is always good and the HDD is cheaper than usual hmmm sounds good but how's the performance though anyone know?

That's different and interesting... hard to combo fit this in any case though... gets messy.


Cheaper than an SSD of similar size too.

Awesome, wonder if we can get it to work on a laptop too as it just has a USB slot.

Nice addon: BerryBoot is part of the package: http://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/berryboot

Unless you need to lower power for cost or build reasons (nominally), just buy a good 5v2A adapter and then spend the extra 10$ and get a 2.5" 1TB 5400 RPM drive or a 2.5" 500GB 5400 RPM for about the same price and a cheap enclosure.  


The biggest gain here for the RPi is the fact you don't have to buy an additional USB enclosure (as it doesn't support SATA), not really the reduction of used power.


However, for boards which do support SATA like the A10, A20, OrangePi, etc, I don't know that this will be any large gain for the cost. I would sooner just buy a 128GB SSD for the same price and use it if the power is really that big of an issue.  For the moment, the slightly lower price with the power reduction will make it a reasonable deal, but once it goes back to normal price, just go buy a regular drive. I personally wouldn't want to rely on a USB adapter board for my data.  I rather be able to access the drive via SATA in case the USB adapter goes tits up. With these drives your pretty much stuck if the USB board dies.


my 2 cents.


Cheers!