Tech – Element 14’s new Pi Desktop- This One Might Be Important – Update: utter disappointment

The Raspberry Pi is very I/O bound, always has been. The latest processor is a four-core and amazingly capable for the price, the 1 mb of memory is pretty scanty but enough to run Linux well, the memory access is plenty fast enough, but of all the “storage” access, the micro-SD card socket, the USB ports, the Ethernet jack, the on-board Bluetooth and Wifi, the fastest is… the USB ports. USB 2.0. That’s just sad, and really, really hampers the user experience. Anyone who has upgraded their main machine from a hard drive to a solid-state drive will tell you that it’s the single most effective thing you can do to improve the entire user experience, short of upgrading a whole machine… and the Raspberry Pi is sort of in the opposite direction, with storage being slower rather than faster.

Inexpensive, durable, air-tight, waterproof storage – the enhanced plastic paint bucket.

So, what you get for for $11.26 is a five gallons of very durable, air-tight, waterproof, easy-to-open and easy-to-close storage, which, if you think about it, is one hell of a lot cheaper than ammo cans, or fake ammo cans, or Chinese fake ammo cans, or plastic fake ammo cans, or… just about any other option I can think of, if you really need durable and water-tight.