Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi

arstechnica.com

219 pointsdoppp83 comments

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Took me a while..... 314GB because Pi=3.14....

Pi Day is celebrated March 14th (3/14)...

http://www.piday.org

Or as the rest of the world calls it 14/3. International Pi Day is celebrated on the 22nd of July.

Or in November, in the 314st day of the year

Western Europe != world. China, Japan, and perhaps other Asian countries use YMD format. (Which imho is God's chosen format, since it sorts trivially.)

I had no idea that was the case, but what do I have to do to emigrate there?

Only in the USA (and where such an absurd date formatting is used).

Hungary uses YYYY/MM/DD which is my favorite, because it's consistent with the endianness of numbers.

Good for them. I wish everybody would move to ISO 8601 formatted (ideally UTC-offset) dates and times.

This is practical for file archiving on a computer.

Inconvenient for computing and manipulating data, for sure, but not absurd. It matches nicely with what is a common pattern of speech in American English when talking about dates. We more often say, "March sixteenth, [2016]" instead of "The sixteenth of March, [2016]."

Besides, neither US nor Europe have it right. YYYY-MM-DD is the way to go.

"Currently available for $31.42".

Which is 31.4% off the $45.81 retail price.

I almost feel like they inflated the price for the lulz, so that the 31.4% discount would be in effect.

I can't think of another reason why that situation would occur, so my feeling is stronger than "almost".

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

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

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

Just realized it's a 35 rounded to 4.

You must be popular on parties.

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.

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

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...

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...

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

But they passed the 2nd QC check, so all good!

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

I think a lot of Flash-based storage devices still work like this - the exact number of blocks they expose depends on how many defects the particular dies happened to have.

I am not sure if this still done with NAND memory - unit cost is low enough that they seem to just dump the bad examples or worse, off load them to dodgy buyers who make those offbrand novelty flash drives sold on ebay.

Not just hard drives, but CPUs are sold like this as well.

For DIY NAS devices I think you need to spend more ($128 USD) and get something like the APU 2 http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2c4.htm and add more SATA ports with the mini PCI express slots.

I got a banana-pi m3 but the onboard sata is now just a USB bridge :(

>I wonder if they limited the drive in software to 314gb and it's just a 500gb drive in reality.

You're probably getting a 500gb or 320gb drive with a lot of failed blocks that would normally be sold through their 're-certified' channel.

I'd stay away from these. Mechanical drives aren't like CPUs or flash media, where turning down the clock or just ignoring the bad blocks means they'll be fine. If there's an issue with spinning drives it probably means there's a larger mechanical issue that will only get worse or lead to an early failure.

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.

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.

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!

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

According to WD:

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

For Europe:

http://store.wdc.com/store/wdeu/en_IE/DisplayAccesoryProduct...

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

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?

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 :(

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?

UK link for completeness:

http://store.wdc.com/store/wdeu/en_GB/DisplayAccesoryProduct...

Currently 27.09GBP, regular price is 39.50GBP.

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.

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

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.

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/

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.

What advantages would a hard drive have over flash memory at that point other than being slightly cheaper?

At least for me, there's people selling 250gb hard drives for $15 on Craigslist if you're willing to go used.

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.

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...

This could make a whole bunch of interesting things possible.

Unavailable for shipping internationally, which is unfortunate.

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

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

http://store.wdc.com/store/wdus/en_US/DisplayAccesoryProduct...

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

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.

It's a real product: http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/

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

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

You bought a fake drive. It only has a few GB of flash memory. Try to fill the drive with some data, then read that data, and you'll see.

Sounds like you got scammed then.

"Error prone" would be accurate. Put some videos on it in logical increments (1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, etc). Find out how much it takes before earlier data starts being overwritten, and you'll know how large the drive actually is.

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.

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

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

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.

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

It was designed with a low price and low energy footprint in mind. Each extra component has a price and energy cost.

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

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.

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

Yes but others (hardkernel, olinuxino...) don't need to put all i/o over slow usb

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

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 ?

I think most of us rpi users have suffered from a corrupted card at some point. It's something that we've looked for for a while to have the reliability of a hard disk drive for projects that need stability.

> I think most of us rpi users have suffered from a corrupted card at some point

For me, that corruptions ended when I got a better (2A) power supply, and that was 18 months ago. If your amperage is too low, I suspect the corruption will continue even on the spinning disks.

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.

There are plenty of options for 256gb thumb drives on Amazon right around $50-$60.. I buy that one won't last as long as a platter but in the year or two that it lasts you'll probably be able to buy a TB for the same price.

Actually even 500GB SSDs are cheaper than this.

1TB SSDs are actually only $230 right now

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226...

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

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

I'd still prefer a 31.4GB SSD drive.

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