Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

PiDrive Raspberry Pi HDD from Western Digital gives the little PC big storage

By

western digital pidrive 1tb storage raspberry pi wdpidrive
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Although Raspeberry Pi computers tend to be used for quite small and simple tasks, which are well suited to their (relatively) low powered hardware, that doesn’t mean some of those functions couldn’t be augmented by a hardware upgrade. Traditionally USB drives and SD cards have offered gigabytes of space to Pi users, but Western Digital wants to up the ante, with a newly compatible one terabyte hard drive, known as the PiDrive.

Of course this wouldn’t be news if this HDD wasn’t a little bit different than your average storage drive. It comes without the usual SATA interface desktop and laptop users are used to, and instead employs a modified USB 3.0 header which allows for a direct connection to the Pi’s USB port. Better yet, it also hooks up to the power port and the power adaptor, which means that you can power both the drive and Pi from the same source, with a single cable.

It also has a built in 4GB MicroSD card to handle an operating system if desired and supports both the Raspberry Pi Model B+ and the Pi 2 Model B.

But of course this isn’t the first time that an enterprising hacker has put together a Pi that boots from or can store information to a hard drive. Traditionally though, a powered USB hub was required to provide data transfer and power to the drive. By removing that need and giving the Pi a new powerbrick in the same breath, it makes a newly equipped Pi much neater.

If you’re still on the fence, the guys over at ProjectPi gave it a sterling thumbs up and they even have a 35 percent discount code (WDPiDrive111) for U.S. and U.K. customers, bringing the standard $80 price tag down to a very reasonable $52 plus shipping.

Topics
Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale
Computing Coordinator
Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…
A dangerous new jailbreak for AI chatbots was just discovered
the side of a Microsoft building

Microsoft has released more details about a troubling new generative AI jailbreak technique it has discovered, called "Skeleton Key." Using this prompt injection method, malicious users can effectively bypass a chatbot's safety guardrails, the security features that keeps ChatGPT from going full Taye.

Skeleton Key is an example of a prompt injection or prompt engineering attack. It's a multi-turn strategy designed to essentially convince an AI model to ignore its ingrained safety guardrails, "[causing] the system to violate its operators’ policies, make decisions unduly influenced by a user, or execute malicious instructions," Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, wrote in the announcement.

Read more