Raspberry Pi 3 kit

[Jason]

Mike: Thanks to you and Bob for working through these bugs. Should make it much easier for when I get a Pi and set it up. Incidentally, what class was your SD card? I remember you had one already so you didn't purchase one and the ones they usually include in kits are class 10. I ask because if you're not using a class 10, the speed boost of 5x might not be as much. And when you mention the 35 mbps speed, are you counting writes or reads?

Would you like to present that topic in April, Mike?

[bobf]

Mine here is a ADATA 32GB Class 10 UHS-1 card, works fine (but I'm going to have to source multiple cards to allow me to quickly switch out one for another, it's just easier, and there are SO many flavours to try...! <^8#) Still haven't made it to Pidora...

[fox]

I now have two cards, both bought at Staples, both Class 10. The original, which I got for $7 on sale but is now $11, is a Kingston. The new one I got is a Sandisk Ultra; it was about $15. The Ultra might be faster but the tests I've seen online suggest no great difference except in random writes (much faster than the Kingston in that). Staples also has a Samsung 32 gb EVO+ for $30. This is one of the fastest cards in the RPi tests, but I don't need 32 gb and it still doesn't approach the speed of an external usb HD or pendrive. The Staples website also lists a 16 gb Samsung EVO for $15, and I definitely would have bought that had it been in the store.

Regardless of what SD card you use, the way to go if you are installing a full distro is to use the card for bootup only, with the actual distro and data on usb. While the good SD cards claim to operate at speeds exceeding 30 mb/sec, none of them are even close when used in a Pi. Refer to this site for speed tests.

Berryboot can run your distro from a usb medium as long as you're using an OS that has been converted to Berryboot squashfs format. (There is a slight modification needed to make this work, but the mod is very easy to do - see my posting on this above.) The Berryboot site also gives instructions on how to convert an RPi distro image to Berryboot format, but I couldn't make it work for the just-released LibreELEC 8.0. The Berryboot site does have a large number of distros already converted to that format, including Ubuntu 16.04 Mate, and the latter is included as one of the defaults to install when you put Berryboot 2.0 on your SD card.

[fox]

Update: a bunch of upgraded distros were posted on the Berryboot site today, including LibreELEC 8.0.