Western Digital starts selling a 314GB PiDrive

[g_t_j]

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.

The thing is, will this work with power from just one USB port from the Pi/Pine? The info is somewhat limited. I've read somewhere that this drive comes with a power adapter and cable that can feed both the HDD and the Pi. I don't see a point in doing this. If it is to use external power for a HDD, I'd rather be using a powered USB hub.

Anyone knows what amperage is that new HDD? If it's rated under 500mAh it should work connected directly to the Pine. There are mSATA SSD's like one made by Kingston which is rated at 3.3V - 0.35A and  work flawlessly with Pine/Pi or any other low power electronic device. If the new WD does not carry similar specifications, I don't see why someone could be bothered to get it.

Power to Harddrive thru Pine64 or RPi USB port is a tricky thing, especially thru the microUSB power connector. When backer received the 2GB board, they will observed one jumper on the middle of the board, this is a new add-on to allow USB ports getting power from the DC in directly or thru PMIC (default). The direct DC in option wiring similar to the WD PiDrive cable arrangement.

You mean the 2GB version features more power efficient USB ports compared to the standard one with 1GV RAM? 

And a bit of an off topic, but as I have you here dear TL Lim, I have a chance! Some users raised concerns that there are chances a number of boards come bended straight from production. Can you shed some light on this?

And another thing. There's a backer who has already received her board and has not been able to connect to the internet via the ethernet running Android OS. Is this a problem with the Android image in general? If yes, is this going to be fixed with an update? If Android won't support internet over ethernet this is really off-putting for many users including me. 

Thanks.