Storage solutions manufacturer Western Digital Corporation has announced the availability of WD PiDrive Foundation Edition products, which combine microSD card and USB drive functionality with operating system installation software, offering the Raspberry Pi community an integrated and affordable storage system solution for fast project creation.††
“It is similar to about 30 years ago when hard disk drives went mainstream in PCs – no more swapping floppy disks in and out to load the OS, applications and data,” says Dave Chew, chief engineer, WDLabs. “This third generation WD PiDrive solution uses a USB HDD or USB Flash drive to run the OS and host multiple Raspberry Pi projects instead of having to do this on a collection of microSD cards. We have combined our technologies to work as a team.”
Custom software, based on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Raspbian OS and NOOBS OS installer, is included with the new system and provides easy installation of operating systems on the USB drive. The WD PiDrive Foundation Edition device is offered in three capacity versions: a 375GB disk drive, a 250GB disk drive, and a 64GB flash drive.†
Raspberry Pi’s official OS, Raspbian PIXEL, can be installed directly from the microSD card. In addition, the drives include Project Spaces, independent portions of the drive with Raspbian Lite, which allows up to five independent projects on a single drive. Raspbian PIXEL also provides a familiar desktop environment and includes a web browser, productivity applications, programming tools, and games.
The WD PiDrive Foundation Edition is priced at $37.49 for the 375GB version, $28.99 for the 250GB version, and $18.99 for the 64GB flash drive version. The new series of storage devices is available online at wd.com.
