I usually like all Odroid products but fail to understand the reason behind making those general purpose boards -beside being excellent for prototyping and development- which will probably cost more than a specialized one and can lack important features often due to space constraints. Can economics be the only reason? For example, although this board can do its job as a firewall, a NAS, or a workstation, what if Odroid made three different models, say:

model A: 3 NICs, no audio, no video, no SATA, aimed at firewalls with DMZ

model B: 1 or 2 NICs, again no audio and no video though a minimum of 2 to 4 SATA ports to be used as NAS/server machines w/software RAID etc.

model C: more powerful CPU, just 1 NIC, audio, video and 1 SATA port to be used as a client/MPC etc.

Would the higher cost of producing 3 specialized boards exceed the benefits of making general purpose ones where for example a powerful and costly GPU is left unused because the user had no alternatives to consider for building his file server? I for one would seriously consider purchasing the first two (as I did with other pcengines.ch firewall boards in the past).

With 2 gigabit Ethernet ports, this would make a great pfSense/OpenBSD router.

Too bad the price will be over $100 though, not including a DDR4 SODIMM, but that’s the price of Intel. Great to see a well-known boardmaker coming out with an up-to-date x86 option.

As someone who is definitely layman in the area, can somebody break it down to me why would people choose an RPi, ODroid, OrangePi or any other small and fanless computers for this or that scenario?

I am very interested in making a home NAS, a Pi-Hole, an OpenVPN server and possibly a VM host -- what are my options if I want a few servers in my bedroom with zero fan noise (even during the summer when the room temperature can be at 35-40 Celsius)? Or should I just sacrifice one floor of shelf space in my small storage room and make sure the machines have good fan cooling?

I've been meaning to inform myself on the subject but real life and job changes have been very annoying and I was recently shocked by the memory that "I've been meaning to do it" for like 2 years now.

So can somebody give a layman a few pros and cons of our options?

(I will definitely use Ethernet on all my home servers. Not interested in how good -- or existent -- their WiFi adapters are. It would even be a bonus for me if I can physically turn off the WiFi on them.)

I could see this being a great home server - it could easily run NAS, Plex, a firewall, and some misc containers. It may be a cheaper option for robotics projects that don't need the compute ability of a NVidia Jetson.

Pretty awesome board:

- Intel J4105 (2.3Ghz Quad-core, fanless!)

- Up to 32GB DDR4

- M.2 SSD (4 x PCIe 2.0)

- 2 x GbE

- 2 x SATA 3.0

- HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 at 4k

- 2xUART, 2xI2C - both at 3.3V

- 110x110x43mm

- Expected to ship in late November, price will be above $100

This would have been a perfect router/firewall box, right up until they chose to use realtek nics.

WHRRRRYYYYYYYYY??????? Realtek in linux is an irreperable shitshow. All my interest evaporated right at that point.

This is a missed opportunity for ARM but its one they consciously took. Even after years of single boards the support for drivers was always abysmal, more of a kick the football around to various stakeholders for open source developers so these single boards never amounted to anything.

And the entire ecosystem has stagnated in terms of performance and improvements so there is no excitement for the future.

Starting a few years ago you could get a Apollo lake NUC for $120 and it would solve all the driver and software issues faced in the arm ecosystem and once you do that you begin to lose interest in all the arm boards because with x86 everything is compatible out of the box. And this seems to be the path Odroid has taken.

They should have go with N3150, not dropping it because it was one step older. I bought a nice mini pc on aliexpress on N3150, 2 NICs, AES-NI, perfect OPNsense home router. It will last a decade. Fanless, small alum unibody.

I have a warm spot in my heart for odroid; wonderful major nerds.

I would love a board like this with AMD's FreeSync support for an arcade machine / retropie build.

The fact that their "HTTPS website" is basically a file list on their webserver doesn't fill me up with confidence...

https://dn.odroid.com/

Power consumption on this thing looks horrendous: 14W on stress load vs 4W for Raspberry Pi 3.

I bought a fun little kit from these folks, the ODROID Go. A little assemble it yourself Gameboy. IIRC, it's got a dual core xtensa chip based off the next gen of the mcu used in the teensy. Good stuff.

I like the NVMe. It got me thinking about a hadoop cluster of these little things. Might even be useful beyond prototyping and testing.

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I wonder, why, in today's world, people still use these for Firewall and NAS purposes.

Both Mikrotik and Ubiquity offer low-cost systems under 100€, that have been purposed for FW+Routing and come with very capable firmwares, 4 network ports and, at least I know this about Ubiquity, specialized CPUs with hardware encryption.

The NAS systems many vendors offer, use the same ARM CPUs for the low cost solutions, but offer more performance for a little bit of extra money, and then, sometimes, allow for ECC and real SATA, instead of these USB<->SATA bridges.

If you want to tinker, you always can, because: it's a computer.

I got a Ubiquity EdgeRouter-Lite as hardware firewall. It comes with:

* 3 Gb Ethernet ports

* 1 console port

* fanless

* EdgeOS, which is a (superb) Vyatta (Debian) clone

* total cost, including PSU and nice metal casing: 90€

As for NAS, and backup in my parent's home I installed a WD MyCloud with 4TB, wiped off the firmware and installed a custom solution, that is available on the WD forums (OpenMediaVault).

Price: approx. 155€, including PSU and nice casing. 10€ more, than the hard disk, that is inside, cost retail, back then. RAM could be a bit more, but this is for my parents, so the only one missing the RAM is me, when I am on vacation.

At home I use two HP MicroServers. A 36NL and its update, I think it's named 40NL.

* AMD CPU

* 4x (real) SATA + 1 aux. SATA (I think it could do RAID, but I use ZFS anyway)

* 16 GB ECC RAM

* 1x Gb Ethernet

* 1x remote control administration card (can switch on and boot, enter the BIOS, install OS via network)

* place for a single 5.25" (I mounted a hard disk swap frame here, that is compatible with my external USB slide in HDD case)

* beautiful case with 4 hard disk swap frames (no hotswap)

* 160W PSU

* not fanless :-(

* Hewlett Packard entry level server, semi-pro

This system cost, including a wimpy 1TB HDD and 1GB RAM, 160€. I run SmartOS on my main server, and am going to install UnRAID or similar, on the elder one, that I am going to use for backup.

As for other appliances: in the kitchen I use a Logitech internet radio, as media clients I use an Android tablet and an NVidia Shield console (USB audio out to external DAC!). Again, no need to do any tinkering above the average level.

This is exactly the thing with appliances: They are domain specific, specialized purpose utilities! That's why you want hardware, that has been specialized, just as your firmware/OS has been specialized (OMV, FreeNAS, pfSense, etc.)

I would never want to have a server without IPMI (remote control) again!

And, since you can get good offers for these devices on the retail market, you can pay less, that for a full SBC setup, which will need a case and a PSU in addition, and which gets sold with an additional retail margin (yes, I know, packages exist).