PiDrive Foundation Edition Makes It Easy to Install Multiple Operating Systems on Your Pi
Using an external hard drive with your Raspberry Pi only takes a few steps , but the new PiDrive Foundation Edition from WDLabs makes it easy to install multiple operating systems for your Raspberry Pi.
PiDrive Foundation Edition is essentially a hard drive that also comes with an SD card installer that allows you to install and boot multiple operating systems. A special version of the NOOBS OS installer is loaded onto the SD card. With it, you can install Raspbian or Raspbian Lite on different disk partitions, which WDLabs calls “Project Spaces”. This essentially allows you to have multiple versions of Raspbian installed on the same hard drive, making it much easier to switch between different projects. It also simplifies the process of installing the operating system to an external hard drive, so if you need to do this instead of an SD card, PiDrive is also worth taking a look at for that.
Project Spaces are a real selling point here, as being able to boot multiple OSes on a Raspberry Pi has always been a challenge. This way, you can easily set up multiple users or projects on the same Pi with a shared partition that each space can access. Unfortunately, only Raspbian and Raspbian Lite are included as an install option here, leaving a hole where the CMSN media center software or RetroPie game emulator would make a hell of a lot of sense as options. You can of course install them manually after Project Spaces has configured each partition, but this is not quite the one-click installer I was hoping for.
However, this is the easiest way to split the Pi’s hard drive across different bootable operating systems, and does what it needs to do. Each time you boot the Pi, you are presented with a screen where you can select the operating system to boot. Here’s what the setup screen looks like to get a better understanding of how it works:
PiDrive also costs about the same as you would pay for any other hard drive and SD card: $ 28.99 for 250GB and $ 37.49 for 375GB. There is also a 64GB version of the flash drive that seems ideal for splitting Pi partitions into several different project spaces. It’s not for everyone, and if you’re good at changing SD cards for every project, then there’s no reason to get a hard drive. However, if you want to run a hard drive with multiple partitions and operating systems, PiDrive is a great way to do it.