WDLabs™, a business growth incubator and accelerator of storage solutions leader Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:WDC), today announced availability of the WD® PiDrive Foundation Edition products, which combine microSD™ card and USB drive functionality with operating system installation software to provide the Raspberry Pi® community an integrated and highly affordable storage system solution for fast project creation. "It is similar to about 30 years ago when hard disk drives went mainstream in PCs - no more swapping floppy disks in and out to load the OS, applications and data," said Dave Chew, chief engineer, WDLabs. "This third generation WD PiDrive solution uses a USB HDD or USB Flash drive to run the OS and host multiple Raspberry Pi projects instead of having to do this on a collection of microSD cards. We have combined our technologies to work as a team." Custom software, based on the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Raspbian OS and NOOBS OS installer, is included with the new system and provides very easy installation of OSes on the USB drive. The large capacity of the drive enables an exclusive 'Project Spaces' feature, which allows installation of multiple instances of the core OS, creating independent spaces for project creation or support for multiple users with isolated work spaces. "Raspberry Pi fans will absolutely love the WD PiDrive Foundation Edition," said Matt Richardson, Product Evangelist for Raspberry Pi Foundation. "Not only is it a fantastic storage solution, but its Project Spaces feature is an innovation that will empower users with more possibilities for creation, experimentation, and fun with Raspberry Pi." "We're excited that WDLabs is tapping into Western Digital's full portfolio of storage technology to support the growing needs of this market," said Steve Campbell, executive vice president and CTO at Western Digital Corporation. "This community's focus on education, invention and new product creation makes it an important segment to seed with new tools and scalable building blocks."
