[wycx]

If your use case is for a low power server, something that many people seem to do, then a Raspberry Pi is suboptimal.

Something based on the Allwinner A20 makes a good choice as the SoC has an integrated ethernet (10/100) and SATA controllers, which means no USB-to-ethernet or USB-to-SATA half-arsery.

I am running an old A10-based Mele A2000 with wired ethernet and a 1 TB SATA HDD as a home server. Stock Debian with a mainline kernel and mainline u-boot 'just works' if you want to run a headless server.

If you want some GPIOs and other pins broken out, look at boards from Olimex [1] or Itead [2] or Cubie [3].

[1] https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/open-source-ha... [2] https://www.itead.cc/development-platform/arm.html [3] http://cubieboard.org/model/