Raspberry Pi1 & Pi2
I just received my new Raspberry Pi2 B micro computer. It is shown on the right side of this photograph. The Pi1 version is on the left all connected and operating. There is a slight delay in firing up the new Pi2 as I ordered the wrong size memory chip. The Pi2 uses a micro SD where as the Pi1 uses the standard size SD memory.
As it turns out it is a fortunate mistake as I actually need a larger memory card for the Pi1. I was using a small 2GB and shown here it is running with the new 8GB I had ordered. The new card is also class 10 and is much faster than the old 2GB. I have no idea the speed but since they are not listing standard 2GB SD cards, it must have been very slow R/W.
A new 8 or 16 GB micro class 10 SDHC costs between $13 - $15 so is not a huge investment. The 16 GB (~40MB/s) is actually faster than the 8GB (30MB/s) but then it could all just be marketing. The device they are used in is the other half of the speed formula.
I have studied the technology behind SD cards and there are invisible very hi tec algorithms running in these memory chips protecting data from bit failure. Storage bits are constantly being moved around to equalize read/write cycles to every available bit. No one area is overused. Amazing technology for the price and reliability. My corporation ran heavy duty cycle tests for months on memory cards to determine the failure rates if used in our equipment. The fix-on-the-fly memory algorithms gave us much better than expected MTBF results.
More to come on what I do with these tiny computers.