2 PC's connected to the same drive possible?

[AlexAtkin]

So, a PC at only 10x the price & power consumption is twice as fast (for some meaningless benchmarks, others it loses on) as a £30 hobbiest board, who'd have thought it.

 

I've no idea how you found out the Pi 2 is slow for web browsing from that.

 

Oh I dunno, maybe because I HAVE a Pi 2 and every time I try to load a website there is a delay of 5-10 seconds before anything even happens. Then if there are more than a few images on the page and you scroll down you may have to wait a second or two for the rendering of the page to catch up. Web browsing is IO intensive, something unhelpful when booting off an SD card.

 

Also, I already pointed out that while the Pi 2 might have low power consumption, the monitor you connect it to won't have. Now as we are also talking about a NAS and KVM switch, we are adding more power. Once you add all that together, it works out more like the power consumption of the T100 in total, potentially higher. Heck, unless you disable the standby power of your PC, it will pull around 5W just in "off" mode to keep the USB ports powered - although you could potentially use that to run the Pi I suppose.

 

Yes of course it costs a lot more, but the OP was specifically talking about using it to save power NOT because it was cheap. I know from experience that is false economy, as if you aim too low you just end up booting the power hungry PC more often because its too frustrating/impractical to use the slower device. However, if you aim slightly higher with your power saving devices specifications you will save VASTLY more power, by avoiding how often you do that.

 

The Pi 2 is an amazing bit of kit, I was surprised when playing with it last night that iperf was clocking 100Mbit over 5Ghz WiFi and nearly 60Mbit over 2.4Ghz (early morning, probably no crosstalk) but its REALLY not designed for heavy browsing sessions. Even just doing brief research using it to try to figure why the first WiFi card I tried wouldn't work, felt painful. The Internet can bring my desktop to its knees sometimes thanks to things like Facebook using infinite scrolling,.

Edited April 28, 2015 by AlexAtkin