Buy a Pi, get an 8GB NOOBS SD card for $5

By now I hope many of you have had a chance to play with NOOBS, the new out of box software we released back at the start of June. Although originally aimed at providing a better experience for newcomers to the Pi, we now reckon NOOBS is the best way for almost everyone to get the most out of their Pi. With this in mind, from today our partners RS Components and element14 will be offering an optional 8GB NOOBS SD card with every new Model A or Model B Raspberry Pi, for only $5. The NOOBS SD card in all its glory. We designed the Pi so that pretty much all the extras you need can be found around the house: there’s not much point in making a $25 computer if your customers need to go out and buy $100 of accessories to use it. Most people can rustle up an old TV, a small SD card and a mobile phone charger. But we’ve noticed that not everybody has access to a large enough card to take advantage of NOOBS, or to a device which can write to SD cards. Fast, pre-programmed, high-capacity cards like the Samsung ones we’re bundling (and which have turned out to be our favourite cards in testing; they’re optimised for random read/write behaviour, unlike many cards which are designed for the large continuous reads and writes that digital cameras make) have been the best-selling Pi accessory offered by our partners since launch, so we’re expecting a lot of you to take us up on this offer. NOOBS in action. $5 is an incredible deal for a fast 8GB card. (Just Google how much these cards usually sell for with nothing on them.) We’d like to thank our partners, and our friends at Samsung, xel and Cardwave for pulling out all the stops to make this happen. A note on SD card nomenclature. The card we’re offering here is rated as Class 4 – in some metrics, Class 4 means slow. This is not the case with this card, which has outperformed many Class 6 and Class 10 cards in our tests – classification seems not to correlate well with random read/write performance. Samsung’s unusual focus on random-access performance on their SD memory means that this card performs very fast and very reliably: we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!

URL: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4536