![Thought about buying one of these (to replace an aging pi nas) until I saw the remote. [1470x929 - 116KB]](https://pic8.co/sh/dxdhBZ.jpg){kind=link}
Thanks for the links, I'll take a look at it, since I've got a couple of 1TB HDD somewhere collecting dust.
I can't speak to how well the HC4 works, but I have an Odroid C2 and a HC2 currently in my rack, and they've performed without issue for some time now. Both run Armbian, the HC2 is my nextcloud server.
How is your USB performance? I find the Raspberry PI's (even the latest gen) to be lack luster and ive been considering replacing at least some of them with the mini pc's like I posted above. At this point they cost about the same anyway.
I use the USB for externals including: Software defined radio (hit and miss). Home Automation Radios. Anything from 433 to various z-wave/zigbee stuff. External storage.
Also, The Odroid boards seem to be readily available, unlike the RPi crap which seems to be concentrating more on their industrial base customers.
The HC2 has a sata port onboard, it's literally designed for NAS-type applications. I can't speak of USB performance since there's nothing connected to it's single USB port.
The C2 is my torrent machine, and serves the torrent directory on a SMB share from an external USB hard drive. It can usually handle 40MBps+ without issue, depending on what else the drive is being asked to do. Of course, CPU load will go to 6/ when doing that, but that's just because USB transfer is an intensive process on these little boards.
It has 4 USB ports, but I only have the one connected since that's all it needs. It also handles Squeezebox duties, so it's not doing a whole lot but the disk access during downloads can get intense.
The HC4 that I suggested to AOU has onboard SATA and is styled like a drive dock.
Consider something like Kodi with a blu tooth keyboard/mouse setup. You can get a "micro pc" for next to nothing now.
https://computers.woot.com/offers/lenovo-m710q-tiny-i5-ssd-desktop-10?ref=w_cnt_lnd_cat_pc_2_13
Its a full PC that can run any OS you want and has an internal HD. You can put a external Blu Ray drive on it if needed.
Feel free to DM me for details. I use stuff like this for my homelab and home automation but it would work just as well as a media center PC and uses next to nothing for power.
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