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

Silly Americans.

[ledow]

It's only Pi day if you don't understand precedence of unit size.

Small / Larger / Largest
DD/MM/YYYY

or Large / Smaller / Smallest
YYYY/MM/DD

None of them make a nice "Pi Day" number.

Unless you're considering the 31/4/1592 or 3141/5/9.

MM/DD/YYYY is just stupid.

Re:Silly Americans.

[supernova87a]

Actually, no it's not, you silly Brit.

There are many valid reasons in spoken English to have the month come first. Think about when you talk to someone about an upcoming appointment / meeting you want to set. It makes a great deal of sense to mention the month first, because that is some of the greatest uncertainty in the statement. If you say, "March 20th" you quickly know that you're speaking about a date coming up soon, versus if you say "the 20th of March", you leave out the month in suspense until the very end.

By the way, this way of speaking is so ingrained in American vs. British English that probably you think it's right regardless of whether it makes practical sense. And you probably think of it rarely, come to that. If there's something to criticize, you might as well start with the ridiculous decimal comma used in Europe number notation first.

From a technical point of view, it also can make sense when coding user interfaces, for example. Take a calendar choice user interface. If you were to have a sequential drop down (this is now a bit outdated of course) where the user selects the day number first. Then, when the next drop down box comes to the month, the selection of the next month could completely reset the number of days that you should be able to choose from. Doesn't make sense, and in fact Qantas used to have this method of choosing dates until they realized it was completely stupid.

Of course, for coding dates for all other purposes, it completely makes sense to use large-->smaller-->smallest. But spoken and written English doesn't have to mirror coding unnecessarily.

By the way, the Declaration of Independence was signed "July 4, 1776". I think we'll be keeping that, thanks.

Re:economics

[bluefoxlucid]

Supply-and-demand is a simplistic theory that generally describes economics in the same way that air pressure dynamics generally describe airplane lift.

Your theory has merit--it's a known market cycle in unsaturated markets--but it tends to fall apart in saturated markets. Competition tends to bring prices down in the long run. In the initial market, a bunch of SSD manufacturers have kept prices high without collusion in an effort to capture early adopters, with notable price differences between them; but as the early adopters started to saturate, the prices started more closely following actual costs. You start getting things like Samsung EVO 850 drives competing on price with friggin' OCZ budget drives. After that point, market destratification starts setting in pretty hard.

Binning parts that don't hold up to test is different. A 1GB flash chip with 10% defect rate can be a 9GB flash chip. A CPU process's variable nature can produce processors that run at 4.5GHz and others that run at 3.9GHz. You trash the broken ones, you repurpose the sub-par ones. That's not artificial; it's a form of quality control. Intel *has* binned high-performance parts as low-performance to balance for market demand, which *is* what you describe.

I don't think an artificially-lowered capacity with a lowered price is sustainable. A competitor will be able to provide something twice as big for the same price. Likewise, competition on 1TB drives will drive them down toward cost, and no amount of of supply-and-demand handwaving will make drives cheaper than cost in the long run--market saturation tends to cause this.