Western Europe != world. China, Japan, and perhaps other Asian countries use YMD format. (Which imho is God's chosen format, since it sorts trivially.)
Inconvenient for computing and manipulating data, for sure, but not absurd. It matches nicely with what is a common pattern of speech in American English when talking about dates. We more often say, "March sixteenth, [2016]" instead of "The sixteenth of March, [2016]."
Besides, neither US nor Europe have it right. YYYY-MM-DD is the way to go.
I wonder if they limited the drive in software to 314gb and it's just a 500gb drive in reality. I have no idea how actual disks are produced and whether or not it's feasible to make specific platters for each product.
In any case very interesting, I wish there was a decent system w/ SATA for making DIY NAS devices, it seems though each raspi-ish with sata lacks gigabit ethernet, or they are limited to USB speeds.
>I wonder if they limited the drive in software to 314gb and it's just a 500gb drive in reality.
You're probably getting a 500gb or 320gb drive with a lot of failed blocks that would normally be sold through their 're-certified' channel.
I'd stay away from these. Mechanical drives aren't like CPUs or flash media, where turning down the clock or just ignoring the bad blocks means they'll be fine. If there's an issue with spinning drives it probably means there's a larger mechanical issue that will only get worse or lead to an early failure.
From what I understand these could be 320GB drives that were rejected because they had too many bad sectors, but still had over 314GB of usable storage. Manufacturers usually don't, but they can definitely control in firmware --- down to individual sectors --- how much usable capacity a drive has. A drive that didn't make 320 would likely be cut down to 250. They don't do it more granular than that because it would either mean a proliferation of models of very similar capacities, with the associated complexity of stock-keeping, or they'd have to sell drives where e.g. 320GB would mean a guaranteed minimum and you might get a 321, 325, or 323GB unit. (The early PC hard drives that came with a list of bad sectors physically printed on them were like this --- some would have more, and some would have less, but they'd all be within a few KB of a "nominal" capacity.)
I wonder if they made this one exactly 613,592,315 sectors...
I think a lot of Flash-based storage devices still work like this - the exact number of blocks they expose depends on how many defects the particular dies happened to have.
I am not sure if this still done with NAND memory - unit cost is low enough that they seem to just dump the bad examples or worse, off load them to dodgy buyers who make those offbrand novelty flash drives sold on ebay.
For DIY NAS devices I think you need to spend more ($128 USD) and get something like the APU 2 http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2c4.htm and add more SATA ports with the mini PCI express slots.
I got a banana-pi m3 but the onboard sata is now just a USB bridge :(
Its a specific drive but obviously will work for other low power devices. Nice going WD, may buy one later.
I've noticed that a lot of caddies actually draw over 1A for a split second when powering up, which is very bad for the USB port long term on older laptops.
No kidding. I have a Rikiki (LaCie, never again)(it's a 2.5" usb powered external HDD) that systematically shuts down my old and trusty eeepc (1000he) when plugged in if the laptop is running on battery.
I've got a similar setup via homebrew. It's a USB 3.0 powered hub along with a USB spinning disk HDD, 500GB. The powered hub combined with the USB 5V power line helps keep the system afloat. For some reason, the system is more stable when it's overclocked to the highest setting!
It's not EU-wide shipping. They're selling into a strange subset of the EU. Basically all the large countries are missing: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK are not listed in the menu of the shipping destinations (UK is listed in the product page but not in that menu). Maybe they don't have enough drives for everybody?
They seem to have separate stores for the large countries, you can see the offer by changing the locale (i.e. en_IE to de_DE) in the URL, but I can't add it to the cart and the search doesn't find it either. Their webshop is rather terrible :(
Maybe they are deliberately not selling this drive in those markets for now. My hypothesis is that they don't have enough units yet but did that already happen before?
Also, what about all those old SSDs replaced with higher capacity ones? folks are upgrading their 128's all the time and these should fit in a caddy nicely.
Still, I don't understand why I can't find HDD smaller than 500GB and cheaper. I guess they mass produce to bring cost down, or maybe 500GB is the most efficient GB/$, but I'd be happy about a 250GB HDD for less.
A hard drive is a set of magnetic platters that's spun by a motor inside a casing with a circuit board. A read-write head rides each platter atop a thin boundary layer of air. The platters are the expensive bits that have QA/QC problems.
There may be 1-5 platters fit in conventional drives, or up to 7 in helium-filled drives (thinner than air).
To build these, it costs the hard-drive maker a given amount for the casing and circuitboard and motors and such, and then some other amount per precision-manufactured platter. A drive that has 5 platters will cost a lot less to make than 5 drives each containing 1 platter.
Hard-drive builders like to work with the same basic parts, so when they switch to a 500GB per 3.5" platter mark, they'll tend to have drives at 500GB, 1000GB, 1500GB, 2000GB, and 2500GB.
The smallest HDD in a form factor tends to be set by the smallest platter they still bother making, and the price for it tends to be remarkably high per gigabyte because there's less data to amortize over the parts needed to make a drive. Generally it will cost them about the same to make a 500GB platter as it cost them to make a 200GB platter a few years earlier.
The cutting edge pushes HDD areal density. A 2.5" platter is smaller and will hold less data per platter than a 3.5" platter.
i don't want to be a debbie downer because i like the raspberry pi too, but this article looks like a Press Release fluff piece. They link to 'prnewswire' and the whole thing seems like an SEO gimmick.
Try formatting the drive, sometimes you'll get the original size. Ten years back there were many mp3 players with fake 1gb storage, which when formatted would show only 256mb.
They're very common overseas. When I lived in Shanghai, the markets would have tons of these. Unfortunately, they aren't always ludicrously oversized/underpriced. I had some data I lost on a 16GB drive that was only 4GB(IIRC). Granted, that was years ago
You can see them on Amazon if you look for flash drives. A few manufacturers will have really large drives (256GB or more) for ridiculously low prices, along with a 1-star rating and a lot of people claiming they are fakes.
There are plenty of legit companies selling devices that are legitimately those sizes, but you will pay a lot for them.
Of course, since flash media prices seem to drop by 25% or more every year, it won't be long before there are real devices at the prices of those fake ones mentioned above.
"Error prone" would be accurate. Put some videos on it in logical increments (1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, etc). Find out how much it takes before earlier data starts being overwritten, and you'll know how large the drive actually is.
The Pi 2 and later use custom chips designed and manufactured solely for use in the Pi. The real reason is that for whatever reason, Broadcom don't seem to be interested in any upgrades beyond sticking a faster ARM CPU in.
Why would I attach a (relatively) large, (relatively) power hungry spinning disk to a raspberry pi when I can very simply attach a nice little compact flash card, or an even faster and smaller mSATA card ...?
Which is not to mention that it already natively accepts microSD cards ...
The most obvious reason is cost per GB. SSD of comparable capacity would cost $200-$400.
Also, for some use cases, spinning HDDs are more reliable. For example, if you’re building a video surveillance server, i.e. you’ll be overwriting the whole drive 24/7 at several megabits/sec, you’ll soon wear out a typical flash drive. In the same conditions, a typical spinning HDD will be just fine, enjoying stable thermal conditions and the lack of spin up/down cycles.
There are plenty of options for 256gb thumb drives on Amazon right around $50-$60.. I buy that one won't last as long as a platter but in the year or two that it lasts you'll probably be able to buy a TB for the same price.
I think most of us rpi users have suffered from a corrupted card at some point. It's something that we've looked for for a while to have the reliability of a hard disk drive for projects that need stability.
> I think most of us rpi users have suffered from a corrupted card at some point
For me, that corruptions ended when I got a better (2A) power supply, and that was 18 months ago. If your amperage is too low, I suspect the corruption will continue even on the spinning disks.
