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So far I do love all the Raspberry Pi's I have laying around at home (1, 2, 3 and 2 Zeros) but I've decided to build my own little cloud at home.

Since the Raspberries lack USB 3 and a Gigabit port it's not going to be the best option for this task. My internet speed at home may not be the greatest but when I'm at home trying to transfer files I do indeed want the full capability of 1 GBit/s.

So I want an alternative with...

  • Gigabit Port
  • USB 3.0
  • (optional) SATA
  • (optional) x86 based processor for Windows
  • under or slightly above 100€ (or $)

Any recommendations? I've already googled a bit but I haven't found a good alternative yet. Thanks in advance!

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    Check here - jaguarboard.org/index.php/products/product_show/… x86 under 100. – JIV Oct 7 '16 at 8:40
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    @JIV This is good for CPU-intensive stuff (Atom is kind of powerful compared to RPi cores), but the lack of USB3 and Gigabit Ethernet make it a poor file server. – Dmitry Grigoryev Oct 7 '16 at 8:51
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    yea, right. What about shop.udoo.org/eu/… but they are just preorder. Anyway I was there before as well, trying to choose single board pc for my server but decided to build it as mITX. Now I have 6 SATA ports and RAID1 running - would not be possible with singleboards – JIV Oct 7 '16 at 14:50
  • @JIV Yeah, I'm sitting here trying to make a decision too. It's funny that a decent mITX PC with case and everything else would cost around 200 bucks, roughly the same as a singleboard with the same specs at the end ;) – Stefan Kern Oct 8 '16 at 17:16
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ODROID-XU4 lacks the features you marked as optional but has everything you require and is sold for $74 at the time of writing (with worldwide shipping) on hardkernel website, though the shop link doesn't seem to work. Anyway, it can be easily found on eBay and similar sites.

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  • Hm, seems nice so far! Any other recommendations with a x86 based processor next? I'm just curious :) – Stefan Kern Oct 7 '16 at 6:39
  • If performance is not a big issue, you can use exagear emulator to run x86 code on ARM (e.g. I use it to run Heroes of Might and Magic 3 on a Banana Pro). They say you can even run Skype on ODROID using this. – Dmitry Grigoryev Oct 7 '16 at 6:59
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    Well exagear looks nice, sad that it costs money tho but hey, not everything in life can be free :) – Stefan Kern Oct 8 '16 at 17:14
5

Have you considered a low-end NUC for that use case?

Probably too late here, but I have the exact same use case and wanted to share my solution and see if you managed to find an alternative. After looking around and finding no single board alternatives, I've come across some lower end NUCs that may work for the task, like the Gigabyte GB-BACE-3000 Brix. It's not exactly the same kind of device, but it ticks all your boxes while still having a very low power consumption. 

Gigabit Port: 1
USB 3.0: 4
(optional) SATA: 1
(optional) x86 based processor for Windows: yes
under or slightly above 100€ (or $): yes
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