PiDrive cable usable with other WD drives?

[DarrenHill]

Just a quick confirmation question - is the PiDrive cable usable with any USB3 drive?

I’m using a Pi Zero as a little portable media player (running OpenELEC Kodi), paired up with a MyPassport Ultra using a little powered hub. But it strikes me that I could very much simplify things by just getting one of the PiDrive cables and using it to power both the Zero and the MP, and also using it for the data transfer (with a USB to micro-USB adaptor to allow for the micro-USB data port on the Zero).

Would that work, with the cable working fine with a MyPassport rather than the specific PiDrive drive itself?

[DarrenHill]

At the risk of talking to myself here, I took the plunge and got one anyway.

It’s now working fine with my MyPassport 2TB and a Pi Zero, albeit with about an inch of spare slack on the power cable arm as it doesn’t have to go anywhere near as far from the data port as it would on a larger Pi. All in all it’s a nice solution, although given you can also back-power the Pi via the data port anyway it’s one that could perhaps be refined a little more in this specific case.

Maybe that could be a new product, or at least a variant for the Pi Zero with the adjusted cable lengths and a micro-USB plug instead of the full-sized one on the data cable arm?

[WROGERS]

I have been working with the PI3 since 3/4/16 with BerryBoot & the 1TB Pi Drive
with much success.

Not wanting to lose all of my cool setups, I pulled my microSD card and Pi Drive
and used a different 4gb microSD card and mounted a 240gb SSD in an external
usb3.0 enclosure and it’s working very well with WD’s BerryBoot.

So, YES, in my tests, the PiDrive cable is usable with off-the-shelf usb3.0 external
enclosures.

Please NOTE: SSD’s draw less power than 5400 RPM Hard Drives, so I’ll try that next…