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

Posted by timothy on from the sum-of-the-parts dept.

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.

28 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Bed Bath & Beyond holds "towel"-day sale on 6/ by Pseudonymous+Powers · · Score: 2

    The 314GB drive, released on Pi Day (3/14), costs $31.42

    Stuff like this makes me wonder exactly what percentage of the U.S. GDP comes from pun-based purchases.

  2. Silly Americans. by ledow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Silly Americans. by xanthines-R-yummy · · Score: 2

      Sounds like someone's jealous of not getting pie at work today!

      (Currently gobbling slices of both pecan pie and apple pie!).

    2. Re:Silly Americans. by supernova87a · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Silly Americans. by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      Yes, but rather ironically you typically refer to it as the "4th of July" don't you?

    4. Re:Silly Americans. by jenningsthecat · · Score: 2

      MM/DD/YYYY is just stupid.

      Exactly. Just as expressing time of day in Minutes, Hours, Seconds would be stupid. By the logic of "MM/DD/YYYY", Pi hour would occur at 14:03:16 instead of at 3:14:16.

      --
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  3. Re:Kind of expensive for 300GB by xanthines-R-yummy · · Score: 3, Informative

    And what are the power requirements for those 4TB drives again?

    The Pi drive, aside from the quasi-humorous capacity, was meant to be low power for the low power Raspberry Pi.

  4. economics by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

    Supply and demand, if the supply of 1TB drives increases then the price of all of them go down. If an artificially reduced capacity can target a different market segment than the 1TB segment then only the products in that segment are impacted by the pricing effects.

    Not exactly the same, but CPU and GPU makes have done the equivalent of this for years, different parts get binned for different speeds. Flash chips with too many flaws are send down to a lower grade and are less resilient to the inevitable wear. I'm sure there are further examples of you getting ripped off with waste.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    1. Re:economics by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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    2. Re:economics by omnichad · · Score: 2

      A 1GB flash chip with 10% defect rate can be a 9GB flash chip.

      Who knew a defect could be such a good thing.

    3. Re:economics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      And you think that I have a bad memory!

  5. Nifty by b0bby · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Nifty by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

      and it's a native USB drive, no SATA connectors. So that's pretty neat.

      Actually, a lot of the USB 3 drives manufactured by WD ARE USB drives, there's no SATA interface exposed anywhere (maybe internally, but that's it).

      They've been around for a couple of years now, if not longer, and are a complete PITA because if something goes wrong, you can't fix it by plugging the drive into a dock. Especially common human-based errors like the connector breaking off or distorted because they yanked it out crooked, dropped it with the connector attached, or pushed it in forcefully.

    2. Re:Nifty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

  6. Approximate Pi Day by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 5, Funny

    Actually for the rest of the world surely 22/7 is close enough to be used as Pi day.

  7. Why aren't there any other stats posted? by Narcocide · · Score: 2

    No seek times, RPM, nothing? Are we not supposed to care?

    1. Re:Why aren't there any other stats posted? by Lord+Crc · · Score: 2

      So it's not compatible with the Raspberry Pi Zero?

      I guess they couldn't get their hands on one to test with.

  8. Silly Pedantics by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

    I don't agree that a society is "stupid" for ordering dates based on how they are typically announced in English.

    In English the options are:
    March 14th, 2016
    14th of March, 2016

    With the later being somewhat archaic sounding in the US, except for the Fourth of July. (the whole "st", "nd", "rd", "th" thing is pretty old fashion too, but I used it in my example for clarity)

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    1. Re:Silly Pedantics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Here is the explanation. People used to use these things called paper calendars and planners. When you wanted to index to a certain date in the calendar (for writing down an appointment or the like), you first found the month, then you found the day of that month. It was generally assumed that you weren't making an appointment a year in advance or that occurs in the past so there was less need for the year and it came last. Very simple. Page to the proper month, index down to the proper day, write down the appointment.

    2. Re:Silly Pedantics by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Funny

      My calendar has 31 pages with 12 months on each page, you insensitive clod.

  9. Re:Kind of expensive for 300GB by Pseudonymous+Powers · · Score: 4, Funny

    Found the virgin!

    Playing "Find the Virgin" on Slashdot is a lot holding an Easter-egg hunt on a 100-acre intensive factory-style chicken hatchery.

  10. Re:Kind of expensive for 300GB by barc0001 · · Score: 2

    The integrated USB interface and power requirements are the draw here, though you could roll your own. You're paying for convenience. You know, the same way people buy a $2-$3 cup of coffee when it would be far cheaper to make it themselves?

  11. Re:Waste by BronsCon · · Score: 2

    Actually, if the 1TB drive is using 2 500GB platters, they'd be lowering the density whether they used 1 or 2 platters. Or, perhaps they use a single 500GB platter and underprovision it, so they're saving on one platter while using existing parts and capitalize on a marketing opportunity.

    Unless my understanding of math is wrong and 314 is suddenly more than 500.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  12. Out of stock by psergiu · · Score: 4, Informative

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

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  13. Re:Waste by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

    A 2 platter drive uses more power than a 1 platter drive.

  14. Re:Correction: the "Towel"-Day sale is on 28 June by sbrown7792 · · Score: 2

    It's not the slash, it's the &

    Discussed here: https://games.slashdot.org/com...

  15. Re:Waste by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

    Two platters have twice as much contact with the air around them.

    What do you think suspends the head above the platter, against the force of the spring/arm holding it down? Air is forced under it by the surface of the platter..

    Here's a random datasheet http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/...
    Idle power between 8.6W and 4.4W. They're all the same physical size, the same series, same RPM, same cache size, same interface.
    Guess what the difference is? Number of platters and number of heads. There's also 4dB difference in noise level.

    The largest power consumer of a modern hard drive is the motor spinning the platters, overcoming the friction of air against them. The platters are basically a Telsa Turbine - a bladeless turbine that's constructed from smooth spinning discs.

  16. The Pi needs fixed, not a hack for everything by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm amazed at the number of people who buy into the Raspberry Pi. We have better boards out there at about the same cost. The Cubie Board, Bannana Pi, and BeagleBone Black are all superior and more reliable / well designed than the Raspberry Pi with its flaky and proprietary software dependencies. I guess when you worked for the company you've got an incentive to go to them for your components in hardware your designing, but man, it's put a real damper on the product.