Raspberry Pi Gets Affordable, Power Efficient 314GB Hard Drive On Pi Day

Mickeycaskill writes: Western Digital has released a had drive optimized for the Raspberry Pi. The 314GB drive, released on Pi Day (3/14), costs $31.42 for a limited time and promises to be more reliable, power efficient and easier to use with the computer than other storage. The company, which also has a 1TB drive, says the unit has been designed to coordinate with the Pi's own power systems in order to minimize energy use without affecting the maximum data transfer rate on a USB connection. The Raspberry Pi Foundation says the new drive will stimulate the development of storage-hungry projects.

Comments

Nifty

[b0bby]

Ok, this isn't the best deal for TB/$, but it's not just a normal drive. I found the WD page:
http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/...
and it's a native USB drive, no SATA connectors. So that's pretty neat.

Re:Nifty

[Anonymous Coward]

The SATA interface is exposed on most of these PCBs at solder points E71 (XMT/A+), E72 (XMT/A-), E73 (XMT/B-), and E75 (XMT/B+). For these to work, a few nearby capacitors need be desoldered, which in turn "disables" the chip that handles the USB chip/interface. The drives themselves still fully support native ATA protocol. Sometimes, alternately you can find drop-in replacement PCBs that provide a native SATA interface (usually taken mobile 2.5" drives). You can find most of this information online (try www.hddoracle.com).

What isn't immediately disclosed on most (all?) of the sites is the fact that on these USB-interface-only WD drives, the USB chip is also what's doing transparent hardware encryption/decryption of the data that goes to the MCU to be written to/read from the platters. This is usually enabled/in place regardless of what's stated on the box (i.e. WD USB 3.0 2TB Passport "Silver" drives make no mention of encryption yet its being done). So even if you do all the wiring legwork or go through the pain of getting a SATA-based PCB (and dump the contents of two SPI EEPROM chips, U12 and U14, and move the contents of U12 to the SATA-based PCB's U12 -- these are either 8-pin SOIC or VSOP chips, i.e. SMT, and if they're VSOP you can't use a SOIC clip to dump/flash them due to the smaller-height form factor), and everything "magically works", your data is still encrypted.

There are several ways to deal with this, none of which are economically feasible for most end-users. The most common recommendation is to invest in a US$8000+ hardware/software tool called PC-3000 from ACE Labs. Another you'll seen thrown around is to use a SATA/USB bridge adapter used in WD MyBook drives (which is like playing roulette -- you don't know what adapter/conversion board you're going to get when you buy one of these things, so the odds of it being 100% compatible with your drive's PCB is unlikely).

What isn't immediately disclosed about the latter is that there are several USB ICs WD chooses to use, none of which are compatible with one another, and there's no standard/commonality in the encryption methods. Sometimes they switch IC vendors on the same product line (e.g. that Silver drive you bought 3 months ago might use a different chip than the one you bought yesterday). The most common I've seen are JMicron (there are two common ICs), and Initio (there are several ICs).

A full paper was published about some (not all) the different chips used and their encryption, several of which are "half-ass" -- but regardless of being such, still make it painful to get data from the platters in the case the main PCB fails. To my knowledge there is still no mainstream (e.g. free) software that can do this decryption if you were to give the software, say, a raw disk image (e.g. using dd) of the encrypted drive (still surprising, since at least for the older JMS538S it looks like it should be doable).

What also isn't disclosed about the "SATA replacement PCB" drop-ins is that they aren't always compatible with the physical hard disk enclosure. For example, it's stated that the SATA PCB version of the 2060-771961-001 is the 771960, however this isn't drop-in compatible due to use of physically larger SPI EEPROM chips. Why would the physically-larger chip be a problem? Because the actual metal/steel of the hard disk enclosure itself doesn't have a deep or wide enough cut-out where the chip would normally sit (when the PCB is mounted), so the PCB can't actually sit flush with the 18-pin I/O interconnect used between the drive and the PCB.

Source: my own experience, when attempting to recover data from two WD My Passport 2TB drives for a friend of a friend as a favour. (I restored 100% of the data off the Silver drive after doing a bit of work writing some scripts for hddsupertool that did VSC (vendor-specific) ATA commands, but wasn't able to with the Black due to what was likely likely a stuck head -- I don't do head stack replacements). I post

Out of stock

[psergiu]

Already "Out of stock" on the WD website :(