Western Digital releases series of Raspberry Pi disk drives

Western Digital (WD) today introduced a new series of storage devices designed specifically for use with Raspberry Pi, a single-board micro PC.

The WD PiDrive Foundation Edition drives include a microSD card preloaded with the custom New Out of Box Software OS installer.

Raspberry Pi's official OS, Raspbian PIXEL, can be installed directly from WD's microSD card without an Internet connection, the company stated. In addition, the drives include Project Spaces, independent partitions of the drive with Raspbian Lite, which allows up to five separate projects to be developed on a single drive.

The drives are available in three capacities: a 375GB hard disk drive (HDD), a 250GB HDD and a 64GB flash drive. The 375GB and 250GB products include a WD PiDrive cable that ensures optimal powering of the hard drive and Raspberry Pi.

"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," Dave Chew, chief engineer at WDLabs, said in a news release.

WD's suggested retail price for the WD PiDrive Foundation Edition is $37.49 for the 375GB version, $28.99 for the 250GB version and $18.99 for the 64GB flash drive version. The WD PiDrive Foundation Edition (375GB and 250GB version) products come with a two-year limited warranty and the 64GB flash drive version comes with a one-year limited warranty.