I have been using Odroid XU4 for home server (home assistant), personal CCTV, controls IR blaster and other sensors for years, still running perfect without rebooting for months. I also have Pi 3 for Pi Hole, but honestly my Odroid XU4 is more stable than Pi 3.
I've owned a XU4 for over a year now. It's been a great piece of kit (once I disabled the fan that is). For me the biggest advantage over the Pi is the extra memory. Especially if you plan to develop any sort of Java services.
Yep yep, I run a cluster of 5 ODroix XU4's (not radically different than a Raspberry Pi), and even doing a ton of video streaming through Emby (which I hate), everything tends to perform just find for the up-to-three concurrent users that are ever on it.
Lots of people say there are superior devices - however the community size and support for Raspberry Pi cannot be overstated.
The price of an Odroid XU4 is significantly proportionally higher and I have no guarantee that certain features or projects are feasible on it. First result from Dec 2017 when searching for "XU4 Kodi" is someone having a problem installing and then saying "I would prefer a version with long term support and wide use base." Well my answer to that is RPi.
I'm merely implying that RPi has a higher chance of certain things working simply because its more popular. I'm not disputing that there are higher performance platforms for "similar" money but it's reliability and a little more certainty that some people are after.
I would love to try one of the ODROID devices, I simply don't have the time. And I love seeing suggestions for these other devices so please don't stop posting them :)
I have an ODROID U2 and love it, but it was much more expensive than my Pis and is a pain in terms of OS support (I'm still running the original kernel since Hardkernel has pretty much dropped support for it, and have hacked my way up to Ubuntu 18.04 on top of it). The Pi's popularity helps a lot in terms of support.
As someone who kept my Pi 1 in a drawer for years and then bought a Pi 4 after they became available again but after building out a bit of a home lab, the internet consensus seems to be you're lucky.
The Pis are energy efficient and worth running apps where catastrophic data loss aren't a concern. I use my Pi 1 with DietPi to run AdGuard and my Pi 4 for simple web apps, like dashboards.
But the world has moved forward and there are options like the ODroid that are almost as cheap and energy efficient, without the relying on an SD card. I run my Home Assistant off my ODroid with nvme. They are all backed up to a couple different places, but my failure expectations are completely different. I fully expect my Pis to just have completely ruined cards one day, whereas I am more worried about a bad update to my Home Assistant server.
https://www.odroid.co.uk/ is the first result from duckduckgo. That should answer your 2nd question too. I bought an odroid some years ago (C1 maybe?) and I found quite a lot of things didn't work. I ended up paying quite a lot after the customs people had their way so I'd always go with a local distributor now. I could have returned it if I'd done that too.
That xu4 link states it runs 16.04 but maybe that's also out of date info. The cpu performance sounds good but I think we'll have to disregard the pi3 comparison they provide as per the throttling the OP describes. Usb and network performance improvements would certainly be worth it for a NAS system, but then you don't get any sata ports.
Gpio wise you've got a non-standard 2mm pitch header and 1.8V. What a pain.
For me, the lack audio output and WiFi is a bit annoying. A media centre with a only hdmi1.4 would be a problem for some (you'd also maybe have to go for the slower one without a fan).
Also remembering we are comparing a £42 device (I've included the official pi PSU) with a £70 device (+ if we want wifi). So maybe it's better compared against an atom board for those who want to spend a bit more. But an atom gives you sata so if that price comparison is fair (edit: had a quick look, it's not fair), the xu4 isn't that great.
Maybe it is the use as a desktop system where the xu4 shines.
I've bought every board that comes out since the 2B. Most of them get gifted to relatives as Kodi boxes. The three I currently use are a 3B that runs the [0] LivPi CO2 and environment monitor, a zero W that has a noIR camera pointing at my plants under lights, and a 2B+ that runs piHole.
I recommend the odroid [1] XU4 (desktop) or [2] HC1 (nas) if you have anything that requires constant read writes. Pi SD cards do go bad over time unless you set it to run the OS from memory. Odroid made a smarter choice going with eMMC early on. The con of odroid is you have to hack everything that was already done on a pi to work.
Like I wrote multiple times before here, I stopped having stability issues with the Raspberry Pi 2 and have had very few issues with SD cards.
I have Pis that have been running for 3+ years now (and that haven't been running longer because I upgraded them to Pi 3 or 4 boards, although they are performing the same jobs), and it's not just the OS either - I have Raspbian on the Pi 3 that runs my desktop touchscreen monitor (which controls all my lighting, and has an uptime of 167 days), and Ubuntu on my Homebridge/Zigbee gateway (which has an uptime of 61 days because I upgraded it before Summer, but has been running for nearly 2 years now).
If you need more CPU power, the RK3588 boards (as long as they have proper Armbian support) are decent bets, but at that point an Intel N100 might be more interesting since those CPUs can average below 10W on light load and will boost to better overall performance. Yes, they will be more expensive, but the going rate is 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for less than $200, so...
But if you want something that just works _forever_ at under 5W mean load, the Pi 4 is still it. And you can boot it off an USB SSD to great effect (I have a Proxmox instance running that way).
Your right, the rpi4 is hardly the best in many ways, but it is the one board that likely isn't going to be abandoned in a couple years. Which despite its very long list of failings has basic support in many places today.
OTOH, for double the money, the ODROID-H2+ kicks the pants off all these devices, by having dual 2.5Gbit Ethernet, actual sata ports _AND_ usb3, expandable ram, nvme boot options, out of the box software support for pretty much anything you can imagine, including particularly freenas, crashplan, plex, and various other things people want to "just work".
I've had Odroid devices in the past. Although they by all means work as advertised, the SW support for the raspberry pi is higher, allowing more recent kernels and with more (most) of the sources available also more tinkering.
I'd recommend to settle for the lower performance unless you really really need it.
I have an ODROID X2 and it was beyond faff - needed its own special PSU (not MicroUSB), wouldn't boot with any USB drives plugged in (power issues), would occasionally just not boot at all, corrupted the SD card a few times, etc.
Was a lovely powerful platform -when it worked-. The Pis are woeful when you compare them for raw power but they're orders of magnitude less dicking about and that's important.
To be more clear, the list of of advantages mentioned above make ODROID-C4 a better choice for any server-like application, while Raspberry Pi 4 is probably better for a personal-computer-like application.
I do not use a credit-card-sized computer as a PC instead of my laptop, but I use such computers in server-like applications, so for my uses, ODROID-C4 is better.
After you add all the required accessories, the prices fror RPI 4 and for ODROID-C4 are very similar, for both of them you would reach around $100 for a decent system, but the ODROID shop is somewhat more convenient because you can buy from a single place almost any accessory you might need besides the basic board.
Which of Raspberry Pi 4 or ODROID-C4 is preferable, depends on the application. Neither of them is better for all applications.
If the power consumption matters, then ODROID-C4 is better.
If the performance of the non-volatile memory is a limitation, then ODROID-C4 is much faster.
If the speed of DRAM is a limitation, then ODROID-C4 is faster.
If the application requires sustained performance with all cores active, then ODROID-C4 is faster, unless a custom cooler is used with RPI 4, which must be either very noisy or very large (larger than the board).
Much faster than a Raspberry Pi 3, I can tell the difference between the two running the same software attached to a large touchscreen. I've got a few dozen OrangePi PC boards going on over a year of being deployed, no issues with any of them yet.
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