Yes it would, but a board who isn't inhibited by sharing the USB and network on the same bus and is supported like rPI wouldn't cost this kind of money. I'm quite surprised about the price (70€ with free shipping over EU), which is very tempting for someone who needs an external drive anyway.
I hope there is more in the future to come in this area to bring the notion of home owned appliances instead of the cloud. Specially with IoT around the corner - those devices should communicate to a home server like this only.
> I hope there is more in the future to come in this area to bring the notion of home owned appliances instead of the cloud.
NAS boxes are relatively popular, and the major vendors are heavily leaning on making them the "all-in-one" home/soho servers as demonstrated by the wide range of applications available to them:
We've made the box hardware-compatible with the oDroid C2 so people have an upgrade path - I understand Linux 4.10 will have out of the box oDroid C2 support so it shouldn't be too much after that that Canonical's Ubuntu Core will support it, too, and users can pick one up if they like.
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/NEW-orange-pi-plus-...