
Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi - doppp
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/western-digital-makes-a-46-314gb-hard-drive-just-for-the-raspberry-pi/
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daurnimator
Took me a while..... 314GB because Pi=3.14....

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Jgrubb
"Currently available for $31.42".

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iamphilrae
Pi is 3.1415, so rounded to four numbers that's 3.142.

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lorenzhs
you rounded that incorrectly, the next digit is a 9: 3.14159265… but of course
you are correct about the $31.42.

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tkjef
4, i know there's a 4 after the last 5. memorized up to that decimal place way
back in the day.

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tkjef
Just realized it's a 35 rounded to 4.

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ArnoldP
I wonder if they limited the drive in software to 314gb and it's just a 500gb
drive in reality. I have no idea how actual disks are produced and whether or
not it's feasible to make specific platters for each product.

In any case very interesting, I wish there was a decent system w/ SATA for
making DIY NAS devices, it seems though each raspi-ish with sata lacks gigabit
ethernet, or they are limited to USB speeds.

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ocdtrekkie
320 GB is a standard size of 2.5" form factor hard drive.

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userbinator
From what I understand these could be 320GB drives that were rejected because
they had too many bad sectors, but still had over 314GB of usable storage.
Manufacturers usually don't, but they can definitely control in firmware ---
down to individual sectors --- how much usable capacity a drive has. A drive
that didn't make 320 would likely be cut down to 250. They don't do it more
granular than that because it would either mean a proliferation of models of
very similar capacities, with the associated complexity of stock-keeping, or
they'd have to sell drives where e.g. 320GB would mean a guaranteed minimum
and you might get a 321, 325, or 323GB unit. (The early PC hard drives that
came with a list of bad sectors physically printed on them were like this ---
some would have more, and some would have less, but they'd all be within a few
KB of a "nominal" capacity.)

I wonder if they made this one exactly 613,592,315 sectors...

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Laforet
Years ago WD sold a 808.8GB drive which reportedly contained two 500GB
platters that had failed QC.

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA67S23Y89...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA67S23Y8983)

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trengrj
It always scares me when buying smaller than normal hard drives in that I am
actually just buying drives that have failed QC.

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beeboop
Hope you never buy anything other than the fastest GPU and CPU for a given
model :)

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conundrum1885
Its a specific drive but obviously will work for other low power devices. Nice
going WD, may buy one later. I've noticed that a lot of caddies actually draw
over 1A for a split second when powering up, which is very bad for the USB
port long term on older laptops.

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johnchristopher
No kidding. I have a Rikiki (LaCie, never again)(it's a 2.5" usb powered
external HDD) that systematically shuts down my old and trusty eeepc (1000he)
when plugged in _if_ the laptop is running on battery.

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rocky1138
I've got a similar setup via homebrew. It's a USB 3.0 powered hub along with a
USB spinning disk HDD, 500GB. The powered hub combined with the USB 5V power
line helps keep the system afloat. For some reason, the system is more stable
when it's overclocked to the highest setting!

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yelnatz
Damn, got to the end of the checkout process before I noticed it was US only.

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yohui
According to WD:

[http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-
pidrive-314gb/](http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/)

> _Sold in US, UK, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cypress, Czech
> Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia,
> Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia,Slovenia,
> Sweden._

Try the link on that page, instead of Ars Technica's link to the US store:
[http://store.wdc.com/promo/97047600](http://store.wdc.com/promo/97047600)

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johansch
For Europe:

[http://store.wdc.com/store/wdeu/en_IE/DisplayAccesoryProduct...](http://store.wdc.com/store/wdeu/en_IE/DisplayAccesoryProductDetailsPage/ThemeID.22586100/productID.335498900/WD_314GB_PiDrive)

(It's 34,28 € with free EU-wide shipping.)

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pmontra
It's not EU-wide shipping. They're selling into a strange subset of the EU.
Basically all the large countries are missing: France, Germany, Italy, Spain,
UK are not listed in the menu of the shipping destinations (UK is listed in
the product page but not in that menu). Maybe they don't have enough drives
for everybody?

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lorenzhs
They seem to have separate stores for the large countries, you can see the
offer by changing the locale (i.e. en_IE to de_DE) in the URL, but I can't add
it to the cart and the search doesn't find it either. Their webshop is rather
terrible :(

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pmontra
Maybe they are deliberately not selling this drive in those markets for now.
My hypothesis is that they don't have enough units yet but did that already
happen before?

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conundrum1885
Also, what about all those old SSDs replaced with higher capacity ones? folks
are upgrading their 128's all the time and these should fit in a caddy nicely.

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Arnt
Is it really 314GB? Or is it actually 314159265kB?

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ConceptJunkie
Or is it really just 320GB and they are calling it 314GB to go along with the
pi-based promotion?

Either way, I'm in for one. I have an extra Pi that I was trying to decide
what to do with, and this harddrive will be perfect.

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toomanybeersies
One of the things I find interesting about the Orange Pi [0] is that it has
SATA headers on it, which would be perfect for a media center.

[0]
[http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiplus2/](http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiplus2/)

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jokoon
Still, I don't understand why I can't find HDD smaller than 500GB and cheaper.
I guess they mass produce to bring cost down, or maybe 500GB is the most
efficient GB/$, but I'd be happy about a 250GB HDD for less.

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mapt
A hard drive is a set of magnetic platters that's spun by a motor inside a
casing with a circuit board. A read-write head rides each platter atop a thin
boundary layer of air. The platters are the expensive bits that have QA/QC
problems.

There may be 1-5 platters fit in conventional drives, or up to 7 in helium-
filled drives (thinner than air).

To build these, it costs the hard-drive maker a given amount for the casing
and circuitboard and motors and such, and then some other amount per
precision-manufactured platter. A drive that has 5 platters will cost a lot
less to make than 5 drives each containing 1 platter.

Hard-drive builders like to work with the same basic parts, so when they
switch to a 500GB per 3.5" platter mark, they'll tend to have drives at 500GB,
1000GB, 1500GB, 2000GB, and 2500GB.

The smallest HDD in a form factor tends to be set by the smallest platter they
still bother making, and the price for it tends to be remarkably high per
gigabyte because there's less data to amortize over the parts needed to make a
drive. Generally it will cost them about the same to make a 500GB platter as
it cost them to make a 200GB platter a few years earlier.

The cutting edge pushes HDD areal density. A 2.5" platter is smaller and will
hold less data per platter than a 3.5" platter.

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ConceptJunkie
I remember when CompUSA had a big sale selling a 340MB hard drive for $340.
They called it the "Buck A Meg" sale.

This would have been around 1994-1995. Boy, things sure have changed...

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ape4
This could make a whole bunch of interesting things possible.

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voltagex_
Unavailable for shipping internationally, which is unfortunate.

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bobbles
This is really awesome, hopefully there is a case soon that accommodates it
for a neat little package

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icefox
Not a bad looking case they sell for it and the pi

[http://store.wdc.com/store/wdus/en_US/DisplayAccesoryProduct...](http://store.wdc.com/store/wdus/en_US/DisplayAccesoryProductDetailsPage/ThemeID.21986300/productID.330357600/WD_Pi_Enclosure%2C_Black)

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yolesaber
I love how scifi this looks. Ordered one, thanks.

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hayksaakian
i don't want to be a debbie downer because i like the raspberry pi too, but
this article looks like a Press Release fluff piece. They link to 'prnewswire'
and the whole thing seems like an SEO gimmick.

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yohui
It's a real product: [http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-
pidrive-314gb/](http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/)

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Natanael_L
But the 1TB version has over 3x the storage and is just above 2x the price.

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pbreit
I bought a 2tb thumb drive in Wish for $16. Is it slow or error prone?

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krisgenre
Try formatting the drive, sometimes you'll get the original size. Ten years
back there were many mp3 players with fake 1gb storage, which when formatted
would show only 256mb.

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chejazi
This sounds hilarious. I would love to hear some stories!

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eximius
They're very common overseas. When I lived in Shanghai, the markets would have
tons of these. Unfortunately, they aren't always ludicrously
oversized/underpriced. I had some data I lost on a 16GB drive that was only
4GB(IIRC). Granted, that was years ago

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ConceptJunkie
You can see them on Amazon if you look for flash drives. A few manufacturers
will have really large drives (256GB or more) for ridiculously low prices,
along with a 1-star rating and a lot of people claiming they are fakes.

There are plenty of legit companies selling devices that are legitimately
those sizes, but you will pay a lot for them.

Of course, since flash media prices seem to drop by 25% or more every year, it
won't be long before there are real devices at the prices of those fake ones
mentioned above.

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mschuster91
I don't really get why the RPi still doesn't have a proper eSATA or at least a
PCIe/TB interface...

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TazeTSchnitzel
The Pi is a cheap device based on phone SoCs, so it's limited to what typical
smartphones can have.

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makomk
The Pi 2 and later use custom chips designed and manufactured solely for use
in the Pi. The real reason is that for whatever reason, Broadcom don't seem to
be interested in any upgrades beyond sticking a faster ARM CPU in.

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TazeTSchnitzel
They are made specifically for the Pi, yes, but they're still basically
customised phone SoCs.

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mschuster91
So if they're already customized, I don't see the problem in adding an eSATA
or "real" Ethernet/MII IP core.

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rsync
I don't understand this at all.

Why would I attach a (relatively) large, (relatively) power hungry _spinning
disk_ to a raspberry pi when I can very simply attach a nice little compact
flash card, or an even faster and smaller mSATA card ...?

Which is not to mention that it already natively accepts microSD cards ...

Why would anyone want this ?

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Const-me
The most obvious reason is cost per GB. SSD of comparable capacity would cost
$200-$400.

Also, for some use cases, spinning HDDs are more reliable. For example, if
you’re building a video surveillance server, i.e. you’ll be overwriting the
whole drive 24/7 at several megabits/sec, you’ll soon wear out a typical flash
drive. In the same conditions, a typical spinning HDD will be just fine,
enjoying stable thermal conditions and the lack of spin up/down cycles.

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dragontamer
1TB SSDs are actually only $230 right now

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226596)

That's a MLC drive btw, not cheap TLC.

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petecox
$230 drive for a $35 computer; surely these aren't in the same niche?

