[Wylug-discuss] Raspberry Pi

[Paul Brook]

> I'm a little worried by reports of USB and SD card sluggishness, but
> I'm not in any hurry to get going, so I'm happy to wait for a few
> rounds of bug fixing in the various distros.

For SD cards that's expected.  They're distressingly slow (and in many cases 
unreliable) in pretty much all circumstances.  While the quoted maximum speeds 
may be reasonable, performance tends to fall off a cliff for real workloads 
where you have many small accesses, especially when writing.

USB tends to be somewhat better. However CPU overhead is still higher than a 
good network or sata/scsi interface.  For flash based devices performance will 
also be dependent on the device.

Probably worth noting that the Pi only has a single USB interface, so that may 
end up being a bottleneck.  OTOH the CPU is also pretty slow, so there's a 
limited amount of data you can usefully process :-)

Paul