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In my experience, one of the highest-impact upgrades you can perform to increase Raspberry Pi performance is to buy the fastest possible microSD card—especially for applications where you need to do a lot of random reads and writes.
There is an order-of-magnitude difference between most cheap cards and the slightly-more-expensive ones (even if both are rated as being in the same class)—especially in small-block random I/O performance. As an example, if you use a normal, cheap microSD card for your database server, normal database operations can literally be 100x slower than if you used a standard microSD card.
Because of this, I went and purchased over a dozen different cards and have been putting them through their paces. Here are the results of those efforts...
Visit TFA for the full table. The overall winner seems to be OWC Envoy SSD (USB), with hdparm buffered: 34.13 MB/s; dd write: 34.4 MB/s; 4K rand read: 7.06 MB/s; 4K rand write: 8.20 MB/s
takyon: The value winner in the article is the Samsung Evo+ 32 GB (purchased for $9.99 from Best Buy) with decent/passable speeds.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2015, @08:42PM
While the testing done in the TFA may not be the most rigorous or scientifically reproduceable, they resemble what I would do if I had the time and are probably more applicable to my real-world performance concerns than the rigorous "fair" tests that usually get published.
And, "RaspberryPi in the title" is kind of relevant - I'm a lot more likely to buy and equip a few Raspberry Pis in the coming months than I am to make decisions about super-computers, esoteric materials, high dollar systems, etc.
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday December 04 2015, @09:24PM
Most people are far more likely to read such a comparison-review with regard to a smartphone or camera or tablet.
In relative terms, Raspberry Pis are non-existent.
Disclosure: I have an old Pi running cups as a print server. Perfectly adequate for any printer that does not need anything more than a ppd for a driver. It only has a class 4 card in it. Maybe someday I'll put in something faster, but realistically, its fast enough.
Oh, look, the stash on the shelf has three Class 10 Ultras still in the bubble-pack. (I tend to buy these when they go on sale even if I have no immediate need.) Maybe I'll upgrade that old Pi. But probably not, since it took me a couple years to find any use for it in the first place.
So much of what people do with PIs is "Just because I can" sort of projects.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 05 2015, @03:48PM
My Pi usage is mostly headless server stuff, but I do run an X desktop on it and I actually develop some stuff in Qt Creator directly on the target Pi, so performance is ... marginal, and the difference between a Class 4 and a Class 10 card is relevant to me during development, not so much in deployment where a Class 4 would be fine.
I've seen vague references in product reviews stating the obvious "not all Class 10 cards are created equally" and have always wondered just how significant those differences are and whether or not I should care. In a practical sense, I too have 3 Class 10 cards still unopened in the bubble pack, purchased to have handy the next time I want to do a "Hold My Beer while I try this new configuration" experiment. But, I do have friends and colleagues who are actively developing new Pi projects, and it's nice to be able to show them what I've got and speak a little more knowledgeably about what the impact of their SD card selection really is.
Mostly, I will send them a link to the article, rather than getting into the discussion directly.
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