Today, I want to do my first review on this blog, concerning the Western Digital / WD Labs PiDrive 314GB. I received this nice little drive from the guys over at PiAndMore as a gift for my three presentations at the PiAndMore 9 (among other loot ;)). So, what is this PiDrive and what is so special about it? Well it is in fact a small 2.5 HDD with integrated Sata to USB 3.0 Controller (with the matching "two-piece" connector). It was specially designed by WD to work with the Raspberry Pi Series and gives the RPi 314 GB of space (hence the name PiDrive - however, there is an 1 TB Version available as well).
So what did I get?
The PiDrive itself, a USB Micro to USB A Connector cable, as well as a power brick. Unfortunately, the power brick turned out to be a UK Version, not a German one, so I needed to get an adapter for that. The Brick itself was a beefy (2A@5V) supply, probably meant to power the RPi and PiDrive at the same time.
I loved the "Pi" finish at the package.
The package itself included the PiDrive (wrapped in a antistatic bag, already removed here ;)) and an business card with some tips on "getting started"
The Drive itself - small, lightweight and quite nice to look at.
Ok, after unpacking, I did some "Google Research" as I normally do when it comes to Harddisks and SSDs. A bunch of people (mostly with 1 TB Versions) already explained they were having problems with the Firmware of the Drive and that there already were an update available. So to not get into problems myself, I turned to WDs Support Website (http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?lang=en) and downloaded the "WD Universal Firmware Updater for Windows". I plugged the included USB Micro Cable into the PiDrive and connected it to my Laptop and saw that this Drive also got an *REALLY BRIGHT* white LED as Status Indicator. However, the LED was blinking on/off continuously and I decided that the Drive probably did not got enough juice from the one USB Port. So I combined an old 2.5 HDD cable (USB A to 2x USB A Y Cable) with an USB Micro OTG Cable, so that I got 2x USB A connectors on the one side (which plugged into my Laptop) and the USB Micro connector on the other side, which connected to the PiDrive. Now I got an steady white lit LED - and I could find the Drive in the Device Manager. After I fired up the Firmware Updater, I directly got the info about a new firmware [1.0.12] and got the drive flashed. Everything went fine :).
So, from that point on, I wanted to use the Drive with one of my Raspberry Pis. As I still got some old RPi Model B, v2.0, I tried to give it a try - but it did not work. The LED was just flashing again, and it seems like I would need an active USB Hub or my special cable to get it working [it did also not show up in dmesg or blkid]. Then I realized, that I already had seen a special connector cable from WD (this one: http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/raspberry-pi-accessories/#pidrive_cable) which had sadly not been sent to me. This cable does directly plug into the power brick and does power up the RPi as well as the PiDrive, so that the RPi did not need to supply about 1 A via the USB port to the PiDrive. Bummer.
Next thing I saw, was the max_usb_current=1 which had to be added to the /boot/config.txt on the RPi card. This - however, does only work from RPi+ Modells on onwards (so RPi A+/B+, RPi 2 B) and should not be needed on the RPi 3, as this is already "on by default". Why does this only works on that versions? They got an little Mosfet included there to GPIO 38 which does activate a kind of "high power mode" for the USB controller. So to see wheter your little modification did work, just try gpio -g read 38 and 1 will tell you, that it worked. An lsusb -v 2>/dev/null | grep -e 'MaxPower' -e 'Bus [0-9]' will also tell you, how much power every device on the RPi draws (Thanks to https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=105502&start=25).
So, after I saw that my RPi 3 got its max_usb_current enabled, I rebooted it with the PiDrive attached to the included USB cable. However, the Drive LED did also blink like on the RPi B v2.0, which was really strange. And it did also not show up in the blkid nor in dmesg. So I did unconnect the PiDrive and used an TeckNet 0.3m USB Micro USB cable - and voilá - it worked right out of the box! With sudo blkid I could see my connected drive and did find out that it already had been mounted to /media/USERNAME/WD_PiDrive_314GB.
So, I did not yet do any speed tests and stuff, but I am pretty happy with this little drive. I am really looking forward to play with it a little bit more. Is it worth the price? Probably. I really like WD drives, I make really good use of WD Blues in my Desktops, WD Greens in some Backup Systems and WD Reds in my NAS/Small Servers. I never had any problems with WD Drives and so I am looking forward to a "nice smooth ride" with this HDD (hopefully ;)) as well.
Thanks a lot for Western Digital to giving these PiDrives out :)!
More infos about i.e. the Berry Boot can be found here: http://wdlabs.wd.com/Support/#berryboot / http://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/berryboot, as well as some nice step-by-step setup in there forums: https://community.wd.com/t/how-to-install-raspbian-on-pidrive-using-windows-pc-step-by-step/134723