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Data point... (or, Class matters...)
Oct. 18th, 2012 09:23 amThe other day, when I wrote a 2-GB disk image to a 4-GB microSD card, the process took 2285 seconds, or a shade over 38 minutes.
Last night, after it became clear that my old PowerShot SX110 could not run CHDK, I put the "Class 6" 4-GB SD card I had bought back in its little plastic box and went on to fool with Dokuwiki, which appears to have a vibrant community of developers and an impressive markup capability (with plugins, no less).
So I got to thinking about possibly testing Dokuwiki on its own. Aabout the only other thing I'd have to install on an SD card with "wheezy" Debian on it would be Apache (since about 99% of all explanations on how to configure a web server assume you have Apache performing that function).
Out of curiosity, I took a close look at the 4-GB microSD card from the other day and saw that it was a "Class 2" card. "Class," in this context, refers to speed, i.e., how fast data can be written to or fetched from the memory. The higher the number, the faster the device. So I inserted the Class 6 card in the same computer as before, started the dd image-writing process, and went downstairs to get a cup of coffee.
The process completed before I got back. It had taken 153 seconds, or about two-and-a-half minutes.
That's about a 15x speed improvement. And unless the SD card interface on the Pi can't handle the higher speed—and a post on SD Card Benchmarks suggests the opposite is true, i.e., the Pi is faster than a PC—I have to figure just about all of the improvement will be apparent on the web server's client.
Enough of that. Time to get down to work.
Last night, after it became clear that my old PowerShot SX110 could not run CHDK, I put the "Class 6" 4-GB SD card I had bought back in its little plastic box and went on to fool with Dokuwiki, which appears to have a vibrant community of developers and an impressive markup capability (with plugins, no less).
So I got to thinking about possibly testing Dokuwiki on its own. Aabout the only other thing I'd have to install on an SD card with "wheezy" Debian on it would be Apache (since about 99% of all explanations on how to configure a web server assume you have Apache performing that function).
Out of curiosity, I took a close look at the 4-GB microSD card from the other day and saw that it was a "Class 2" card. "Class," in this context, refers to speed, i.e., how fast data can be written to or fetched from the memory. The higher the number, the faster the device. So I inserted the Class 6 card in the same computer as before, started the dd image-writing process, and went downstairs to get a cup of coffee.
The process completed before I got back. It had taken 153 seconds, or about two-and-a-half minutes.
That's about a 15x speed improvement. And unless the SD card interface on the Pi can't handle the higher speed—and a post on SD Card Benchmarks suggests the opposite is true, i.e., the Pi is faster than a PC—I have to figure just about all of the improvement will be apparent on the web server's client.
Enough of that. Time to get down to work.
