Western Digital PiDrive

[Jens Bauer]

I know that this topic actually concerns all ARM boards, but I've chosen to post in TV-boxes, because they really need some kind of harddisk attachment, especially when used as servers (so you don't wear down the SD-card).

Some time ago, Western Digital made a USB-drive, which was specially designed for the Raspberry Pi.

https://www.wdc.com/en-ie/search-results.html?q=pidrive

 

Personally I'm using two 1TB WD-blue with my CubieBoard2, because the CubieBoard2 has buit-in S-ATA interface.

But TV-boxes usually don't have S-ATA, so the PiDrive is an option worth considering.

What's special about this drive ?

At a glance, nothing really. It's a USB drive.

But ... it's actually designed to use less power than other USB drives. It's also designed with low price in mind.

The drives come in 250GB, 314GB, 375GB and 1TB sizes and prices range from 25 Euro to 33 Euro - so I'd recommend a 1TB for 33 Euro.

[tkaiser]

Sorry, but besides all this WD marketing BS (targetting the most clueless SBC users on this planet: Raspberry Pi users) the only real 'invention' is the 'WD PiDrive Cable' since preventing underpowering issues with SBC that are broken by design like Raspberry Pis relying on crappy Micro USB to be powered.

 

2 hours ago, Jens Bauer said:

It's a USB drive.

 

LOL, these are SATA drives with an integrated USB to SATA bridge with branded firmware to masquerade the origin (GL, JMicron, ASMedia, Prolific, Initio as in the past)

 

Few info: https://community.wd.com/t/technical-questions-regarding-pidrive/142658/7, though smartmontools works with -d sat' but hdparm still doesn't work: https://discourse.osmc.tv/t/wd-pidrive-squicky-sounds/18311/3 (I don't trust in any WD drive I'm not able to configure wrt 'WD LCC problem' since I don't like HDDs dying too early.

 

The WD forum is full of underpowering issues, maybe that's the reason WD currently has a 50% discount... They also needed to provide a firmware fix for a lot of the old models reporting wrong capacity. Maybe the USB-to-SATA bridge used here is an attempt to sell broken 2.5" HDDs (way too slow and with a lot of bad sectors that are remapped by the firmware)? Would explain the low prices... (nope, stupid thought)

 

Edit: well, other people also thought about WD just re-using HDDs with broken platters: "The 314GB HDD — an internal drive manufactured for WD’s MyPassport 2.5-inch external HDD series but presumably rejected for that role because of one or two failed platters, hence the odd, non-standard capacity". Well, maybe it's just a single platter drive with tons of remapped sectors and instead of throwing away the stuff they sell it now to Pi users with a firmware hiding what happened 

[Jens Bauer]

1 hour ago, tkaiser said:

LOL, these are SATA drives with an integrated USB to SATA bridge

I am aware that they have integrated S-ATA to USB bridge (you know every USB drive has that - unless very old of course).

 

Personally I never had any issues with Western Digital drives and I was not aware that there were problems with the PiDrive.

I've burned one IBM Deskstar (before Hitachi took over), a number of Seagates, 2 Maxtor and 2 Rhodime drives; that took me less than a year (the Maxtor drives took a couple of months to break). All my Western Digital drives have lasted for many years by now. I've had WD since 2007 and they're all still working without problems.

 

[tkaiser]

1 minute ago, Jens Bauer said:

All my Western Digital drives have lasted for many years by now. I've had WD since 2007 and they're all still working without problems.

 

A web search for 'wd lcc issue' is sufficient to get the idea why WD drives connected to Linux boxes should be accessible with hdparm/wdidle3.