WD's PiDrive cooks up extra storage for Raspberry Pi owners

Hot on the heels of the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 comes a nifty external drive from Western Digital.

The WD PiDrive is targeted at those who want a good dollop of storage for their miniature computer, and don't want to pay the earth for the privilege.

Based on the WD Blue slim drive, it offers a capacity of 314GB and is designed especially for the Pi, hooking up via USB but only sipping a small amount of power.

In fact, WD claims it has tailored the design to reduce the power load the hard drive has on the Pi to a minimum while still maintaining performance levels to enable the max data transfer rate via the USB port.

In other words, this is an efficient external drive that plays nice with the Pi's power requirements without sacrificing performance (or indeed reliability, the company claims). It's also compact, being 7mm in height.

Berry nice...

WD has also got together with the author of BerryBoot to bundle a special version of the software for PiDrive users, which includes apps that feature the use of mass storage devices with the Pi.

And rounding things off, the asking price is set at a temptingly low level, with the regular price being £39.50 ($45.81 over in the US, which is around AU$61), although the device is currently discounted on the WD Store to £27.09 ($31.42 in the US, which is around AU$42).

The PiDrive is compatible with the Raspberry Pi Model B+, Raspberry Pi 2 and of course the new Raspberry Pi 3.

• Also check out: Supercharge your Raspberry Pi