WD PiDrive Is a 314GB Hard Drive Designed for Your Raspberry Pi

WD PiDrive

Soon after launched the third version of low power Raspberry Pi, WDLabs, a part of Western Digital (WD) Corporation, announced the availability of the WD PiDrive - a uniquely crafted storage solution design for Raspberry Pi devices - on the occasion of Pi Day. The drive is currently available in a capacity of 314GB (a play on the first few decimals in the mathematical constant and transcendental number Pi) and is on sale at an introductory price of $31.42 (approximately Rs. 2,100) and comes with a two-year warranty. All orders will start shipping by March 30.

The drive is based on WD's high-volume 500GB with features certain design changes engineered for low-power USB operation. Further customisations have also been made to the drive's magnetic recording and electrical system in order to align it with Raspberry Pi's USB data and power design. This specialised drive is a boon for those looking to add additional storage to their projects.

"Adoption of Raspberry Pi computing devices is expanding at a tremendous rate, reaching eight million units in about four years. However, the millions of Raspberry Pi users are finding limitations from data storage devices (SD card, USB hard drive or cloud storage) originally designed for other applications," said Dave Chew, chief engineer, WDLabs. "The WD PiDrive 314GB HDD is designed to support Raspberry Pi growth by addressing barriers to hard drive adoption such as affordability, power loading and system set-up. In addition, we've maintained the key strengths of hard drive technology, including mass-storage value, high data integrity and reliability."

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Raspberry Pi 3 Launched with 64-Bit CPU, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi at $35

The Raspberry Pi foundation has launched the third version of its popular low-power Raspberry Pi development platform, the Raspberry Pi 3. It's priced at $35, the same as the Raspberry Pi 2 mini computer unveiled last year, but adds a much request feature - integrated Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth connectivity also comes with faster 64-bit quad-core Broadcom BCM2837 SoC with ARM Cortex-A53 CPU.

"The 900MHz 32-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU complex has been replaced by a custom-hardened 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53. Combining a 33% increase in clock speed with various architectural enhancements, this provides a 50-60% increase in performance in 32-bit mode versus Raspberry Pi 2, or roughly a factor of ten over the original Raspberry Pi," said Upton.

Raspberry Pi 3 will go on sale starting Monday from element14 and RS Components, and other resellers. The company also announced that at launch they will be using the same 32-bit Raspbian userland that have been used on other (previous generation) Raspberry Pi devices. The company will decide whether to move to the 64-bit mode over the next few months after investigating.

Raspberry Pi 3

Key Features :

• 1.2GHz Quad-Core Broadcom BCM2387 ARM Cortex-A53 processor, Dual Core VideoCore IV GPU
• 1GB LPDDR2 RAM, microSD Card Slot
• Operating System: Operating System Boots from Micro SD card, running a version of the Linux operating system or Windows 10 IoT
• 802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1 (Bluetooth Classic and LE)
• Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
• Camera Connector: 15-pin MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI-2)
• Display Connector: Display Serial Interface (DSI) 15 way flat flex cable connector with two data lanes and a clock lane
• Power: Micro USB socket 5V1, 2.5A
• Ethernet: 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
• Video Output: HDMI (rev 1.3 & 1.4, Composite RCA (PAL and NTSC)
• Audio Output: 3.5mm jack, HDMI, USB 4 x USB 2.0 Connector
• GPIO Connector: 40-pin 2.54 mm (100 mil) expansion header: 2×20 strip Providing 27 GPIO pins as well as +3.3 V, +5 V and GND supply lines