Aye, Aye Raspberry Pi

whufclee · Post by **whufclee** » Wed Jul 18, 2012 6:38 pm

Well I'm very excited about setting up this new Raspberry Pi in front of me but I've stumbled at the very first block!

I can't seem to find an SD card in any of my drawers or boxes of crap at home so thought I'd just go ahead and order a class 10 one from somewhere. Just before I went ahead and done that I thought I'd better do some research first and it turns out that class 10 aren't necessarily the best for sticking an OS on - apparently I need to focus more on the random read/write speed benchmarks.

Can anyone recommend a suitable SD card? I've literally only ever used them for cameras, phones and Nintendo consoles before so never needed to worry about speed. I found the compatibility list on the wiki but it doesn't tell me which ones are the best so any advice would be much appreciated.

Post by **BuZz** » Wed Jul 18, 2012 7:31 pm

Id love to help, but I bought two cards that don't work at all with the pi - that will teach me not to RTFM first

xbs · Post by **xbs** » Thu Jul 19, 2012 7:19 pm

I'm using a Kingston 4GB microSD Class 4 (can't say the model number) and a Samsung 8GB SDHC Class 10 (MB-MP8GA).
Both work pretty well with OpenELEC and Raspbmc.

whufclee · Post by **whufclee** » Fri Jul 20, 2012 10:06 am

Cheers mate, well I now have a list of working ones http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#SD_cards

What I really want is a benchmark table of SD Cards that have the best random read/write speeds. I want to use a fast card so when I'm debugging I can at least rule out the SD Card if it's sluggish. The speeds the manufacturers seem to show everyone is for sequential read/write which is fine if you're using a camera or something but when running an OS it's all about the random read/write (so I'm told!).

ldotsfan · Post by **ldotsfan** » Wed Jul 25, 2012 4:15 pm

No issues with Sandisk SD cards so far. From what I read, the power supply is a more common culprit for the Pi's problems. Now to get back to getting scratchbox2 to work so that I can cross-compile bootc's raspbian kernel...

GhostlyGamer · Post by **GhostlyGamer** » Wed Jul 25, 2012 7:33 pm

I want one, but Im not in the UK so shipping is insane and so is the waiting line

asbo · Post by **asbo** » Wed Jul 25, 2012 7:44 pm

GhostlyGamer wrote:I want one, but Im not in the UK so shipping is insane and so is the waiting line

I'm pretty sure the distributors have warehouses on most continents? Shipping should be local.

GhostlyGamer · Post by **GhostlyGamer** » Wed Jul 25, 2012 8:05 pm

asbo wrote:
GhostlyGamer wrote:I want one, but Im not in the UK so shipping is insane and so is the waiting line
I'm pretty sure the distributors have warehouses on most continents? Shipping should be local.

i havent found any US distributors

asbo · Post by **asbo** » Wed Jul 25, 2012 8:09 pm

http://www.newark.com/jsp/search/produc ... tt=83T1943
http://www.alliedelec.com/lp/120626raso ... ector-Page

Dollars!

No idea how much the delivery is though so you may be right about it being loads.

whufclee · Post by **whufclee** » Wed Jul 25, 2012 9:57 pm

ldotsfan wrote:No issues with Sandisk SD cards so far. From what I read, the power supply is a more common culprit for the Pi's problems. Now to get back to getting scratchbox2 to work so that I can cross-compile bootc's raspbian kernel...

Thanks, that seems to be the general consensus on the forums so I ordered a SanDisk earlier. I'll post my results when I have it.

whufclee · Post by **whufclee** » Sun Jul 29, 2012 6:39 pm

Results so far...

Had a little play with the Raspberry today and so far it look encouraging. First I tried Raspbmc which was an absolute doddle to install on an SD card via Windows, just one click and it's done. I tried a non branded micro SD card that I had in my tablet and also a sandisk 16gb micro sd card. I think the sandisk was slightly quicker but that could well just be in my head! Navigation could be painfully slow at times but playback seemed good, I tried an HD mkv and an SD Divx and both worked fine.

Next up I thought I'd try the OpenElec build. It was a little trickier to install but certainly not difficult. Not had much of a play with it yet but it definately seems a lot quicker that Raspbmc and I tried playing the same files I tried on Raspbmc and had the same good results. I also installed [removed] via fusion and that also worked fine although it seems to take a long time to load the pictures - that could possibly be due the to non-branded card I'm using, I'll try the sandisk later on in the week and see if that makes any difference. I think it should be quicker once the cache fills up a bit.

Overall both builds seem to show much promise and whilst the OpenElec build is the quickest it's currently still only comparable to the xbox in speed. It does however have the bonus of running Eden so auto-updates the addons. I do like the look of Raspbmc though and it not only updates xbmc but also the OS when a newer version is available. Once this is done maybe I'll give Android a proper testing - I've heard good things from Kozz about it

xbs · Post by **xbs** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 10:42 am

I'm also using OpenELEC because it seems quicker, my MS remote works prefectly out of the box and DTS plays better with few pauses.
OpenELEC is more restrictive than Raspbmc but for the use I give it it's my "distro" of choice.
Older OpenELEC bluids used to have menu sound but the new ones don't (not very important).
I'm also using sparky0815 (search Google) FAT builds to update OpenELEC.

Post by **BuZz** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 2:37 pm

openelec has hard float support which would make a difference. raspxbmc will have that in rc4 though i believe.

whufclee · Post by **whufclee** » Tue Jul 31, 2012 6:46 am

Cheers xbs I'll take a look at sparky0815, forgot to mention I also have no menu sound (in either disro) and my WMC Remote also works sweet out of the box - it's a cheap Chinese knock-off from ebay but works straight out of the box.

openelec has hard float support which would make a difference. raspxbmc will have that in rc4 though i believe.

Mate that means absolutely nothing to me lol. Do you think that will improve the speed? I do prefer the ideas behind the Raspbmc distro so would be sweet if they can get that running a bit faster soon.

xbs · Post by **xbs** » Wed Aug 01, 2012 10:54 am

Android 4.0 is coming!

Source: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1700

whufclee · Post by **whufclee** » Wed Aug 01, 2012 12:43 pm

Oh man now you're talking, always thought it must be a possibility with the CPU used in the pi. That is brilliant news, thanks for the link mate.

evan_almighty · Post by **evan_almighty** » Fri Aug 03, 2012 10:54 pm

Had mine for 3-4 weeks now, only just started playing with it since the release of the Debian Raspian release.
But still can't get sound to work properly through the HDMI interface.
If I play a .wav file the first part is basically white noise and the last second or so is fine.
I tried one of the XBMC releases and that was fine. So it's not a H/W problem, I'm thinking a driver issue,
everything else seems fine. Anyone else have any similar problems?
I've o/c'd mine to 800mhz now without issues.

xbs · Post by **xbs** » Sun Aug 05, 2012 2:19 pm

I'm OC'ing mine also to 850 mhz.
In OElec default is 700 mhz.

GhostlyGamer · Post by **GhostlyGamer** » Mon Aug 06, 2012 4:06 am

xbs wrote:I'm OC'ing mine also to 850 mhz.

oh man. big man on campus

xbs · Post by **xbs** » Mon Aug 06, 2012 2:03 pm

It's not much considering Raspbmc is running 800mhz on default.

btw Raspbmc RC4 is out with lots of improvements like hard float.

Aye, Aye Raspberry Pi

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