Can we talk SBCs...

Can we talk SBCs? Never had one but thinking of picking up one for a small home NAS which i'm currently running on an old laptop. How are ODROIDs? Are they really better than pi? Strong enough for plex playback of my chinese cartoons in 10bit/HEVC? Ideally I'd like one with 3 USB 3.0 ports to make offsite backups easier, but I could do with a hub for backups, probably.

pretty good christmas light controllers. i display sick christmas lights patterns that will make autist sick and my neighbors jelly

If you have to ask, i'm assuming that you don't have the skills to make a SBC work for your setup. Get a normal Pi 3 for your backup project, and buy a media player wtih that extra cost. The Raspberry is the only one, with extensive documentation and tons of forums with guides. I use raspberry's for most of my things, i have 6 now. (Including something like )

I just got something called Libre computer, by some Chinese guys calling themself Le Potato, the hardware supports HEVC, VP9, 10bit, 4k60fps, all that shit. But you will get next to none software support. Don't expect to just download something and it'll work.

What the fuck do my skills have to do with me asking if this chink sbc is strong enough for chinese cartoons?

Odroid C2 is quite excellent and far better than Raspberry Pi 3
Odroid XU4 is too expensive compared to Nucs
Odroid C1, C1+ good but underpowered.
source: have them all.

They don't have embedded wifi so it's an issue sometimes
XU4 requires 4A to run as well, beware

>If you have to ask...
What a meme. How does anyone learn anything? Knowledge doesn't exist in a vacuum.

I use an ODROID XU4 with a CloudShell2 as a NAS + server for other stuff (Pi-Hole, ZNC, rtorrent). I have 2x8TB disks "inside" it, and I also have it rigged up using USB3) to a 4x4TB HDD-Dock as backup (with an extra 5TB disk on the side acting as SnapRAID parity).

Works really well, spent a bit of money for sure, but it's very power efficient while also being pretty strong.

I have an ODROID-C2 running Android (sadly not Android TV, not yet available) for the parents (Kodi + 'catch up TV' apps). Works well enough. I tested it briefly in LibreELEC and it was basically flawless.

>XU4 requires 4A to run as well, beware
Some resellers recently had issues with their 4A power adapter batch (in the UK). They would trip out under load. I got a 6A adapter before I realised the fault was theirs, but they refunded me once I got in touch.

I don't use either any more, since I use the CloudShell2 (which has its own adapter, due to HDDs needing 15V).

I got mine from pollin.de earlier this year and got a first batch (the ones which are plugged via round plug and not micro usb plug).
Tells a lot about the sales of the XU4.
I had many problems with HDMI, couldn't display in 32bit, lots of noise on screen sometimes. Also the guys who make amateur distros for it are turbo autists.

All in all it can be good for headless server (I'm using it like that nowadays) but if you want an everyday computer, prefer a used laptop sitting on a usb-desk-fan (with a defective screen that you'll remove, plugged to a monitor, it can be really cheap for i5 25xx or even 32xx)

Oh, there were versions of the XU4 which use microUSB? I wasn't aware there were revisions like that. Mine has the round plug too ofc.

Yeah, mine is headless, and as much as I'm aware of how powerful it can be for "normal" use, it still doesn't strike me as an appropriate device for that, so ofc it can be outshadowed by conventional Intel stuff.

It's also not just about the initial cost of the hardware to perform a certain task, it's also about power consumption.

Oh I forgot, I replaced the stock fan by a huge radiator from ameridroid.
Fans are way too noisy on that machine.

I don't know what to use my Raspberry Pi for. I've already tried
Using it as a PC
Retropie
FTP Server
Web Server

But I just can't seem to find a good use for it

Install Amibian on it
A very nice amiga emulator distro

Or go to arcadepunks and get a distro to build an arcade cabinet

Pi3 is nice to have something better than IoT or cool emulators

sensible people buy something *after* they find a use for it

If you want a NAS, the RPi is actually quite terrible. All four USB ports and the 100Mb NIC hang off the same single line of USB 2.0, so any appreciable combination of USB and network traffic will choke it very easily.

Build a robot or a drone.

I will make a shitpost bot if that's possible

great and fun little things, think I've got around 16 pis of varying types and an olimex that turned out to be a bit of a lemon

Well, I've been thinking ODROID C2 or XU4 actually, I'm pretty sure those two will be powerful enough for a small NAS and plex playback. I'm thinking of following the anons here and getting a XU4 with cloudshell.

Forgot to ask, what do you guys run for NAS on odroids? I've been using Openmediavault.

Is OMV a distro or is it just a software package? I run Arch Linux ARM because autism, also I run it as a NAS /and/ other things (as mentioned previously).

The USB3 of the XU4 is a great help. Make sure you understand the difference between the CloudShell and the CloudShell2.

It's basically cli Debian with networking capabilities preinstalled and a nice web gui. You can set up pretty much everything from the gui. I've been just testing for 2 days now though.

Sounds convenient enough. Though I think I'll stick to my setup. I'm sure what it does can still be served by other packages, somehow or other.

Sounds good, yeah. Keeps giving me problems though. I couldn't get any plugins to work on 3.0.86 so i installed 3.0.75 today but now I can't even find the smb server from any devices. I think it's just buggy.