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Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi
- bobbles 11y agoThis is really awesome, hopefully there is a case soon that accommodates it for a neat little package
- icefox 11y agoNot a bad looking case they sell for it and the pi http://store.wdc.com/store/wdus/en_US/DisplayAccesoryProductDetailsPage/ThemeID.21986300/productID.330357600/WD_Pi_Enclosure%2C_Black http://store.wdc.com/store/wdus/en_US/DisplayAccesoryProduct...
- yolesaber 11y agoI love how scifi this looks. Ordered one, thanks.
- ArnoldP 11y agoI wonder if they limited the drive in software to 314gb and it's just a 500gb drive in reality. I have no idea how actual disks are produced and whether or not it's feasible to make specific platters for each product. In any case very interesting, I wish there was a decent system w/ SATA for making DIY NAS devices, it seems though each raspi-ish with sata lacks gigabit ethernet, or they are limited to USB speeds.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago320 GB is a standard size of 2.5" form factor hard drive.
- userbinator 11y agoFrom what I understand these could be 320GB drives that were rejected because they had too many bad sectors, but still had over 314GB of usable storage. Manufacturers usually don't, but they can definitely control in firmware --- down to individual sectors --- how much usable capacity a drive has. A drive that didn't make 320 would likely be cut down to 250. They don't do it more granular than that because it would either mean a proliferation of models of very similar capacities, with the associated complexity of stock-keeping, or they'd have to sell drives where e.g. 320GB would mean a guaranteed minimum and you might get a 321, 325, or 323GB unit. (The early PC hard drives that came with a list of bad sectors physically printed on them were like this --- some would have more, and some would have less, but they'd all be within a few KB of a "nominal" capacity.) I wonder if they made this one exactly 613,592,315 sectors...
- Laforet 11y agoYears ago WD sold a 808.8GB drive which reportedly contained two 500GB platters that had failed QC. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA67S23Y8983 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA67S23Y89...
- makomk 11y agoI think a lot of Flash-based storage devices still work like this - the exact number of blocks they expose depends on how many defects the particular dies happened to have.
- josh64 11y agoFor DIY NAS devices I think you need to spend more ($128 USD) and get something like the APU 2 http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2c4.htm http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2c4.htm and add more SATA ports with the mini PCI express slots. I got a banana-pi m3 but the onboard sata is now just a USB bridge :(
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago>I wonder if they limited the drive in software to 314gb and it's just a 500gb drive in reality. You're probably getting a 500gb or 320gb drive with a lot of failed blocks that would normally be sold through their 're-certified' channel. I'd stay away from these. Mechanical drives aren't like CPUs or flash media, where turning down the clock or just ignoring the bad blocks means they'll be fine. If there's an issue with spinning drives it probably means there's a larger mechanical issue that will only get worse or lead to an early failure.
- daurnimator 11y agoTook me a while..... 314GB because Pi=3.14....
- 8ig8 11y agoPi Day is celebrated March 14th (3/14)... http://www.piday.org http://www.piday.org
- jon-wood 11y agoOr as the rest of the world calls it 14/3. International Pi Day is celebrated on the 22nd of July.
- bitwize 11y agoWestern Europe != world. China, Japan, and perhaps other Asian countries use YMD format. (Which imho is God's chosen format, since it sorts trivially.)
- jon-wood 11y agoI had no idea that was the case, but what do I have to do to emigrate there?
- _lce0 11y agoOr in November, in the 314st day of the year
- daemin 11y agoOnly in the USA (and where such an absurd date formatting is used).
- carlob 11y agoHungary uses YYYY/MM/DD which is my favorite, because it's consistent with the endianness of numbers.
- voltagex_ 11y agoUnavailable for shipping internationally, which is unfortunate.
- yohui 11y agoAccording to WD: http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/ http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/ > Sold in US, UK, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cypress, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia,Slovenia, Sweden. Try the link on that page, instead of Ars Technica's link to the US store: http://store.wdc.com/promo/97047600 http://store.wdc.com/promo/97047600
- hayksaakian 11y agoi don't want to be a debbie downer because i like the raspberry pi too, but this article looks like a Press Release fluff piece. They link to 'prnewswire' and the whole thing seems like an SEO gimmick.
- yohui 11y agoIt's a real product: http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/ http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/
- yelnatz 11y agoDamn, got to the end of the checkout process before I noticed it was US only.
- yohui 11y agoAccording to WD: http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/ http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/ > Sold in US, UK, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cypress, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia,Slovenia, Sweden. Try the link on that page, instead of Ars Technica's link to the US store: http://store.wdc.com/promo/97047600 http://store.wdc.com/promo/97047600
- johansch 11y agoFor Europe: http://store.wdc.com/store/wdeu/en_IE/DisplayAccesoryProductDetailsPage/ThemeID.22586100/productID.335498900/WD_314GB_PiDrive http://store.wdc.com/store/wdeu/en_IE/DisplayAccesoryProduct... (It's 34,28 € with free EU-wide shipping.)
- pmontra 11y agoIt's not EU-wide shipping. They're selling into a strange subset of the EU. Basically all the large countries are missing: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK are not listed in the menu of the shipping destinations (UK is listed in the product page but not in that menu). Maybe they don't have enough drives for everybody?
- lorenzhs 11y agoThey seem to have separate stores for the large countries, you can see the offer by changing the locale (i.e. en_IE to de_DE) in the URL, but I can't add it to the cart and the search doesn't find it either. Their webshop is rather terrible :(
- 11y ago
- rsync 11y agoI don't understand this at all. Why would I attach a (relatively) large, (relatively) power hungry spinning disk to a raspberry pi when I can very simply attach a nice little compact flash card, or an even faster and smaller mSATA card ...? Which is not to mention that it already natively accepts microSD cards ... Why would anyone want this ?
- raziel2701 11y agoI think most of us rpi users have suffered from a corrupted card at some point. It's something that we've looked for for a while to have the reliability of a hard disk drive for projects that need stability.
- sangnoir 11y ago> I think most of us rpi users have suffered from a corrupted card at some point For me, that corruptions ended when I got a better (2A) power supply, and that was 18 months ago. If your amperage is too low, I suspect the corruption will continue even on the spinning disks.
- Const-me 11y agoThe most obvious reason is cost per GB. SSD of comparable capacity would cost $200-$400. Also, for some use cases, spinning HDDs are more reliable. For example, if you’re building a video surveillance server, i.e. you’ll be overwriting the whole drive 24/7 at several megabits/sec, you’ll soon wear out a typical flash drive. In the same conditions, a typical spinning HDD will be just fine, enjoying stable thermal conditions and the lack of spin up/down cycles.
- rocky1138 11y agoI've got a similar setup via homebrew. It's a USB 3.0 powered hub along with a USB spinning disk HDD, 500GB. The powered hub combined with the USB 5V power line helps keep the system afloat. For some reason, the system is more stable when it's overclocked to the highest setting!
- toomanybeersies 11y agoOne of the things I find interesting about the Orange Pi [0] is that it has SATA headers on it, which would be perfect for a media center. [0] http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiplus2/ http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiplus2/
- pbreit 11y agoI bought a 2tb thumb drive in Wish for $16. Is it slow or error prone?
- Const-me 11y agoYou bought a fake drive. It only has a few GB of flash memory. Try to fill the drive with some data, then read that data, and you'll see.
- eximius 11y agoSounds like you got scammed then.
- khedoros 11y ago"Error prone" would be accurate. Put some videos on it in logical increments (1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, etc). Find out how much it takes before earlier data starts being overwritten, and you'll know how large the drive actually is.
- krisgenre 11y agoTry formatting the drive, sometimes you'll get the original size. Ten years back there were many mp3 players with fake 1gb storage, which when formatted would show only 256mb.
- chejazi 11y agoThis sounds hilarious. I would love to hear some stories!
- eximius 11y agoThey're very common overseas. When I lived in Shanghai, the markets would have tons of these. Unfortunately, they aren't always ludicrously oversized/underpriced. I had some data I lost on a 16GB drive that was only 4GB(IIRC). Granted, that was years ago
- 11y ago
- conundrum1885 11y agoIts a specific drive but obviously will work for other low power devices. Nice going WD, may buy one later. I've noticed that a lot of caddies actually draw over 1A for a split second when powering up, which is very bad for the USB port long term on older laptops.
- johnchristopher 11y agoNo kidding. I have a Rikiki (LaCie, never again)(it's a 2.5" usb powered external HDD) that systematically shuts down my old and trusty eeepc (1000he) when plugged in if the laptop is running on battery.
- conundrum1885 11y agoAlso, what about all those old SSDs replaced with higher capacity ones? folks are upgrading their 128's all the time and these should fit in a caddy nicely.
- Natanael_L 11y agoBut the 1TB version has over 3x the storage and is just above 2x the price.
- mschuster91 11y agoI don't really get why the RPi still doesn't have a proper eSATA or at least a PCIe/TB interface...
- amag 11y agoIt was designed with a low price and low energy footprint in mind. Each extra component has a price and energy cost.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoThe Pi is a cheap device based on phone SoCs, so it's limited to what typical smartphones can have.
- makomk 11y agoThe Pi 2 and later use custom chips designed and manufactured solely for use in the Pi. The real reason is that for whatever reason, Broadcom don't seem to be interested in any upgrades beyond sticking a faster ARM CPU in.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoThey are made specifically for the Pi, yes, but they're still basically customised phone SoCs.
- mkesper 11y agoYes but others (hardkernel, olinuxino...) don't need to put all i/o over slow usb
- mschuster91 11y agoSo if they're already customized, I don't see the problem in adding an eSATA or "real" Ethernet/MII IP core.
- jokoon 11y agoStill, I don't understand why I can't find HDD smaller than 500GB and cheaper. I guess they mass produce to bring cost down, or maybe 500GB is the most efficient GB/$, but I'd be happy about a 250GB HDD for less.
- mapt 11y agoA hard drive is a set of magnetic platters that's spun by a motor inside a casing with a circuit board. A read-write head rides each platter atop a thin boundary layer of air. The platters are the expensive bits that have QA/QC problems. There may be 1-5 platters fit in conventional drives, or up to 7 in helium-filled drives (thinner than air). To build these, it costs the hard-drive maker a given amount for the casing and circuitboard and motors and such, and then some other amount per precision-manufactured platter. A drive that has 5 platters will cost a lot less to make than 5 drives each containing 1 platter. Hard-drive builders like to work with the same basic parts, so when they switch to a 500GB per 3.5" platter mark, they'll tend to have drives at 500GB, 1000GB, 1500GB, 2000GB, and 2500GB. The smallest HDD in a form factor tends to be set by the smallest platter they still bother making, and the price for it tends to be remarkably high per gigabyte because there's less data to amortize over the parts needed to make a drive. Generally it will cost them about the same to make a 500GB platter as it cost them to make a 200GB platter a few years earlier. The cutting edge pushes HDD areal density. A 2.5" platter is smaller and will hold less data per platter than a 3.5" platter.
- rangibaby 11y agoWhat advantages would a hard drive have over flash memory at that point other than being slightly cheaper?
- spencerflem 11y agoAt least for me, there's people selling 250gb hard drives for $15 on Craigslist if you're willing to go used.
- Arnt 11y agoIs it really 314GB? Or is it actually 314159265kB?
- ConceptJunkie 11y agoOr is it really just 320GB and they are calling it 314GB to go along with the pi-based promotion? Either way, I'm in for one. I have an extra Pi that I was trying to decide what to do with, and this harddrive will be perfect.
- ape4 11y agoThis could make a whole bunch of interesting things possible.
- ConceptJunkie 11y agoI remember when CompUSA had a big sale selling a 340MB hard drive for $340. They called it the "Buck A Meg" sale. This would have been around 1994-1995. Boy, things sure have changed...