When comparing Banana Pi M3 vs ODROID-HC4, the Slant community recommends ODROID-HC4 for most people. In the question“What are the best single-board computers for building a NAS system?” ODROID-HC4 is ranked 9th while Banana Pi M3 is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose ODROID-HC4 is:
When installing OpenMediaVault with Debian it feels pretty fast for such a small thing. Easy and well documented and an active community at the software side.
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Pros
Pro Official support for multiple Desktop-version Linux distros
Banana Pi officially supports Fedora, Arch, Lubuntu and openSUSE. It also can be used with Raspbian (Debian derivative) or Android.
Pro Excellent compatibility with Raspberry Pi software
Other than having a port of Raspbian (the official OS for Raspberry Pi) available for use with full capabilities, Banana Pi can also use many applications that were originally written for Raspberry. One of these is WiringPi, a C/C++ library which gives easy access to Raspberry's I/O with a strong Arduino flavor. But that is just one example of the many open source projects being ported to Banana Pi.
Pro All the necessary features to setup a true NAS with disk mirroring
When installing OpenMediaVault with Debian it feels pretty fast for such a small thing. Easy and well documented and an active community at the software side.
Pro Dual drive for RAID mirroring
Useful to keep your data backed up in case of single drive failure.
Pro 3.5" drive and 12V support
No extra cables necessary for 3.5" drives and plenty of power.
Cons
Con No off-the-shelf camera modules
The A20 chip that the Banana Pi uses lacks a true Camera Serial Interface implementation, instead it uses a parallel camera interface. The problem with this is that there are no off-the-shelf camera modules that support this and can connect to the Banana Pi, but it should be mentioned that the makers of Banana Pi have promised to create a camera module that is supported by it.
Con Expensive
It costs $129.99.
Con Requires 15V power supply
12V 5.5/2.2mm barrel supplies are everywhere, but it should 1up with USB C power input instead.
Con Only one USB port and does not like power cut
Better to use a small UPS and keep a SD card with the flash boot installed.
Con Boot button is on bottom
Makes it more difficult to access when drives are installed, as opposed to on the back, sides, or front.