Dear Core Electronics team,
This may well be a recommendation to purchase the NOOBs preloaded on a microsd card. But for those who persist, read on.
I did go to my alma mater and used their high speed wifi. This has a lot to do with trying to download the NOOBs from the RPi site.
The wifi at my uni is super fast. I connected to wifi with a USB 3.0 wifi adapter (TP-Link) at 400mbs (no I did not mistype, it was 400mbs). I was able to download very large files in order of 600MB in less than a few minutes. Amongst other lawful downloads I was able to download the MS’s IOT for the RPi (over 600MB) in less than a few minutes.
That is except for NOOBs. Despite the ultra high speed wifi, the connection to the RPi site broke down, and the speeds were extremely slow. For example downloading speed of IOT was 6mbs, while downloading NOOBs was 0.250Mbs at most. In addition, the connection frequently dropped out!
At home, downloading NOOBS was slightly better at about 0.250-0.300Mbs but again experienced drop outs.
Then I reluctantly tried downloading using the method of the BitTorrent. This was the first time I used bit-torrent and is the last time I will use bit-torrent. The estimated download time would have been anytime between 3 hours and 14 hours. It was extremely slow. I uninstalled the bit-torrent client.
My final attempt was to google search NOOBS_v2_8_1.zip, (version 2.8.1 as of 26/4/2018) and was able to find one site at Rutgers university http://debian.rutgers.edu/raspbian_images/raspberrypi/images/raspbian/NOOBS/ and saved NOOBS_v2_8_1.zip to my computer. The download speed was at 0.258Mbs and unlike the dropouts from from the RPi site (even from the uni), I successfully downloaded the NOOBS in about 2 hours.
I made a backup copy of the NOOBs zip file. I inspected the zip file, and the readme file informs us how to install NOOBs for microsds <= 32GB and >32GB. The card formatter for MS and Mac is available at https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/index.html .
In sum if you are having trouble downloading the NOOBs because of dropouts even if you are using the very best and fastest university wifi, I would recommend purchasing SKU: CEOO279 https://core-electronics.com.au/16gb-microsd-card-with-noobs-for-raspberry-pi-3-model-b.html . Alternatively downloading from Rutgers University in the US will be reliable but rather slow at about 0.250Mbs taking about 2 hours to download.
Thank you,
Anthony from Belfield