Raspberry Pi is getting its own hard drive, in time for Pi Day.
Western Digital today announced PiDrive, a 314GB (get it?) storage unit specifically for the development community.
The device is designed to handle low-power USB operation, and has affordability and ease of integration in mind, according to the storage vendor. This was achieved by modifying the magnetic recording and electrical system operating set-points of a 500GB platform, while maintaining USB data transfer rates.
“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 at WDLabs said in a statement. “The WD PiDrive 314 GB HDD is designed to support Raspberry Pi growth by addressing barriers to hard drive adoption such as affordability, power loading and system set-up.”
For Raspberry developers, WDLabs and the author of BerryBoot have also created a modified version of the operating system. It includes software applications that use mass-storage devices with Raspberry Pi. With it, certain operating systems and software applications can be stored on the WD PiDrive HDD.
The WD PiDrive 314GB HDD is compatible with all WD PiDrive cables, cable kits and WD PiDrive enclosures. MSRP is $45.81 USD.