Raspberry Pi speed test

I finally got around to "building out" my Raspberry Pi. Building it out is a rather superfluous explanation, basically all I did was remove it from the package, open the case I bought, put them together, add the SD card, and connect a cell phone charger. For the initial run I hooked it up to our Samsung TV, stealing the HDMI and network cable from the Seagate FreeAgent Theater I used in the TVersity review. What follows is just the simple speed test I ran against it.

For the speed test I used LAN Speed Test v2.0.8. Additionally on the Raspberry Pi I had to install Samba. Since my 'nix capabilities are rudimentary, I followed the excellent samba install guide at Simon the Pi Man.

Anyway, this is a lot of buildup for one simple picture. The Raspberry Pi has a 100 Mbit interface. I set up the share to a folder on the SD card, which is the boot media for the Raspberry Pi. Writing to the Raspberry Pi I saw about 76 Mbps, reading from the Raspberry Pi came in a little slower at 52 Mbps.



I'm still looking for the niche use for my Pi. I initially thought about using it as an SSH tunnel X11-forwarder so I could get around WebSense at work. I know I could use a strict SSH tunnel, but my experience has been forwarding the whole browser through X11 is a better solution. Preliminary tests indicate the Raspberry Pi isn't the best choice for that. Browser options don't have flash and some javascript, they also peg the processor for quite some time when opening pages. The Raspberry Pi is a $35 computer so both are expected, however I had high hopes.

I will continue to explore more options with the Raspberry Pi, but wanted to link a couple of articles which helped me a lot as I was fiddling with it.

Simon the Pi Man's Samba installation guide

Setting up your Raspberry Pi with RDP-compatible Remote Desktop

MagPi - online magazine highlighting Raspberry Pi ideas