The Raspberry Pi Foundation has brought a new model of the Pi to the table, so with the same low price it was easy to add to my Pi family.
For those not yet familiar with the RPi 2, it keeps the small and simple form factor of its predecessors, but gives performance upgrades in the form of an 800mhz quad core processor, with overclocking options still available, and combined it with a whole Gigabyte of RAM. These upgrades, on paper at least sound that it could make the Pi into a useable desktop machine, with less freezing during full CPU load that was easy to achieve previously.
As for a use for it, my original Pi was still doing great as a TV media player and I turned my B+ into a download server handling Usenet and Torrents, the B+ handled this role however the Pi2’s enhancements in computing power would help speed up downloads and decompiling.
For setup I followed the same procedure used on the B+, although swapping microSD cards between the B+ and Pi2 would have been easier, due to the different architectures in the processors this is not possible. Not to worry however as the setup steps were fresh in my mind:
- Install Debian
- Static IP address to SSH into easily
- Tweak config.txt to allow 1amp output on the USB ports
- Install and auto mount USB hard drive
- Install Samba and setup shares
- Install Transmission for Torrents
- Install SABNZB+ and add RAR support
All steps come in at about an hour’s work when doing it second time round.
So with the Pi2 fully replacing the B+, what is the difference in performance? Well where data transfer is involved the most notable and pleasing difference is the transfer rate over Samba. All Raspberry Pi’s have a 100Mbps Ethernet, and all versions the port is part of the USB bus so the processor bears the brunt of handling transfers, The B+ would only utilize half the available network bandwidth due to the limitations of the processor, the Pi2 however manages to saturate the fast Ethernet connection, 100Mbps is not great for someone use to Gigabit speeds but at least all of the connection can be used.
Other than that there is not much difference, decompressing RAR files are sped up but still well off the capability of even the modest HP Microserver N36L. But luckily the upgrade in performance has not impacted the usability of the Pi, with users of the B and B+ being able to seamlessly switch over to the new version.