03-16-2016, 02:48 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-16-2016, 02:53 PM by MichaelMeissner.)
Well, it is a USB drive, so in theory it should work. But so should any other external USB drive. For the special price of $31.42, if you only need 314GB, it is probably the cheapest total cost, but not necessarily cheapest/GB. Note, I suspect that this is a special offer made for pi day (3/14/2106 in US date notation), and when it runs out, you would probably need to step up to $50-60 or so for 1TB drives. Likely the drive is a 1TB drive or an old 512GB drive that is software limited to 314GB.
Whether or not WD actually did something special to reduce the power requirements like they claim, I dunno.
There is documentation that to use such disks without a USB powered hub, on the pi you need to twiddle a gpio pin so that the USB bus will deliver 1200mA of power instead of 600mA. I don't know if you need similar hackery on the pine64.
Like the Pi, the pine64 does not have USB 3.0 or e-sata support, so it will work, but it won't be as fast as a similar drive hooked up to a modern desktop or laptop. I see that the Banana Pi has a SATA connection, but it is somewhat more expensive then pine64. You get what you pay for I guess.
Whether or not WD actually did something special to reduce the power requirements like they claim, I dunno.
There is documentation that to use such disks without a USB powered hub, on the pi you need to twiddle a gpio pin so that the USB bus will deliver 1200mA of power instead of 600mA. I don't know if you need similar hackery on the pine64.
Like the Pi, the pine64 does not have USB 3.0 or e-sata support, so it will work, but it won't be as fast as a similar drive hooked up to a modern desktop or laptop. I see that the Banana Pi has a SATA connection, but it is somewhat more expensive then pine64. You get what you pay for I guess.