Western Digital's 314GB Drive Offers RPi A Low-Power Solution

The Raspberry Pi, in all its incarnations, have become a darling within the hacker and hobbyist community. That's due to the little board's potential and affordability. The RPi alone, however, isn't capable enough for all the magical things you might want to make it do. That's were all the connectors and accessories and extra storage space comes in. Western Digital, one of the bigger names in the digital storage industry, is trying to woo this growing market of makers and tinkerers and has announced a 314GB PiDrive designed specifically with the Raspberry Pi's constraints in mind.

314 GB might be an odd sum as far as storage goes, and you might be right. In fact, the PiDrive is actually based on WD's 500 GB drive platform. However, WD wasn't content to simply slap on some large capacity drive inside. It instead modified that in order to make sure the PiDrive works well with the Raspberry Pi. For example, it customized the hard drive's magnetic recording system in order to draw less power than a conventional HDD. Considering how low-power the RPi, those are watts definitely worth saving. That said, WD tried its best to make sure that it doesn't sacrifice read/write performance in the process.

Although not integral to the PiDrive, there is a custom version of the BerryBoot bootloader available for owners. What this software does is allow users to install multiple operating systems and applications software on the PiDrive as they need or want. Then when the RPi is booted, they will be presented with a menu to choose which OS to boot into.

Part of what fans of the RPi love about the board is the near dirt cheap price. Knowing that it is addressing a budget-conscious market, Western Digital is pricing the PiDrive 314GB in a similar fashion. Now available from the WD Store, the drive only costs $45.81 and already comes with cables, cable kits, and even an enclosure. But for a limited time, WD is selling it with a 31.4% discount for only $31.42.

With the Raspberry Pi 3, the first 64-bit RPi, just recently made available, the race is on to make the next great innovations and experiments. The 314 GB Western Digital PiDrive can help in that creative process by making available no small amount of space, at low power and at low cost.