Title: My brother gave me a Raspberry 400 (starter kit) because he knew I&#x27;d geek out on it and really evaluate it.<p>If you give it fast enough &quot;disk&quot; storage it really moves.  I plugged in a Kingston brand 120GB SSD on a USB3 adapter.  hdparm -t gave 292MB&#x2F;s read speed and the default LXDE environment was really crisply responsive, with even a first launch of Chromium taking less than two seconds.  With such good storage, the only real limitation is that heavy Javascript stuff is too slow - 5+ seconds to switch between folders in Chrome, or for the thumbnail gallery to appear in Youtube.  Also, video calling is marginal.  Aside from that the CPU is fast enough.<p>Then I accidentally yanked a cable.  And the SSD was bricked.  I was able to unbrick it again with the long-powerup-without-data-cable trick, but plainly this setup is too fragile.<p>USB boot is a game changer.  A junk drawer 8GB USB stick works just fine, aside from the fact that it takes many minutes to copy the OS image onto it in the first place.<p>An old 60GB SATA laptop hard disk in the same USB3 case that I tried the SSD in is pretty good.  About like a decent SD card, but without the scary wear&#x2F;corruption issues. I can post the brand (Can$14 on Amazon) and the workaround needed for its broken (or at least Linux incompatible) UAS.<p>Bluetooth Audio actually works. In the typical use case, with this thing plugged via HDMI&#x2F;DVI adapter into an old junk monitor, you can use additional clutter, like a $3 USB headset adapter and computer speakers to get sound or at least plug in a headphone.  But if you have a bluetooth headphone or speaker, you don&#x27;t need cables at all.  I can post the recipe that worked for me for this.
Upvote: