what holds me back from Odroid is their scarce support to updates. I remember the Odroid X series left to ancient Ubuntu and kernel due lack of upstream support. Better buy a RPi4 with a NAS Hat
A couple of years ago I bought a C2 and it still hasn't progressed beyond the 3.14 kernel required by the versions of Android Samsung was shipping on phones using that chip[1]. Also, getting the display working correctly with a monitor attached via an HDMI to DVI-D cable was obnoxious (again reflecting the CPU's Android heritage - hardware expects to be told exactly what's attached and doesn't try to detect anything).
[1]: https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c2/software/building_kernel
If you expect a flashable vendor-provided OS image with long-term support and vendor repos that get continuous updates, I think you'll be frustrated with anything else than a Raspberry Pi or NVIDIA Jetson.
If you're fine with community images and configuring/compiling kernels yourself, vendors like Odroid/RockPi/NanoPi/OrangePi/Pine64 are fanastic. They're hardware manufacturers, not an OS vendor.
At least the spec is open enough that anyone has the ability to do things like Armbian without having to do reverse-engineering or extracting data from binary blobs (which is the case with a lot of other vendors).
The Odroid C2 was released in 2016 and is now EoL.
For all my disappointment, it has served as a useful lesson on early-adoption and expectation management. =) So I'm not regretful, just cautious.
> Better buy a RPi4 with a NAS Hat
Do you know of such a HAT that does USB-attached SCSI Protocol correctly and reliably, and passes through SMART reporting without meddling, and doesn't inappropriately spin down the disks under its control? I wouldn't mind bookmarking such a thing if it exists.
I considered the RPi for a recent NAS build, but I didn't want the higher CPU load imposed by a USB-to-SATA bridge (as compared to native/PCIe SATA), nor did I want to play chipset roulette looking for a SATA bridge free from the problems I mentioned above.
I ended up using a RockPro64 with a Marvell 88SE9235 PCIe SATA card. It works well, and boots mainline Debian with no vendor blobs. Assuming the electronics don't wear out, I expect it will continue to run fully-updated linux for a long time to come.
Apart from iOS on supported hardware, I'm yet to experience a platform that's been entirely free of such issues.
Pick up a sketchy Android TV box from Ali that's not in the top 3 and yes, you're in for some "fun" times.