nematocyst

I went ahead with the Orange PI 3 LTS soln. Been running it a few days, major kick in the backup speed compared to my previous server. I notice it does get a little hot... 78C during a backup last night, but usually around 58-62C. I haven't put a H/S on it yet, not sure how much that'll help. Also, the eth0 uses polling instead of an IRQ. is this something that might change someday with OS updates? The box won't go under 1.00 load because of that. I wonder how much of the power->heat comes from that. It would be nice, also, to disable HDMI, the GPU, and unused USB systems. I don't know if that's possible or not; it could be done on my old server, to pretty nice reduction in power.

I'm looking to update my current Armbian File server (orange pi plus). The main reason is to gain USB3 for faster file serving, particularly rsync. I have little need for most of the features available (bluetooth,wifi,gpio,audio,hdmi), just a stable, low-cost, box that has usb3/gigabit ethernet and doesn't need a fan. I was thinking of an orange pi 3 lts for this purpose-- it seems to run armbian, and it won't break the bank at 54usd shipped with case + power supply. Do you see any problems with this choice or have alternative choices?