djx-treme

I think there will be soon, but I'm not certain of anything I mention below; they're just hints and pointers that might/might not be helpful.
 
So far, I've not found any "one complete solution" to your request, and none of the below suggestions will run Armbian yet.
 
@tkaiser mentioned quite a few interesting boards to me; the one that stick to my memory the best is Solid-Run's awesome Community board.
While the $349 Community board does not have a built-in graphics card, it does have PCIe, which means you should be able to add a graphics card of your own choice.
I can count at least 3 S-ATA connectors on the community board, which means you could set up your harddisks in RAID configuration.
Here's a link to the Marvell Armada 8040 chipset used in the board and a direct link to the Community Board itself (also linked to by Marvell on the above page). Please note that the Armada 8040 is a Quad-core 64-bit Cortex-A72 (blazing fast).
I'd like to mention that Solid-Run makes high-quality hardware. This means it might be more expensive, but it will last a lot longer.
I think that using the Community board as a video recorder would be "extreme overkill" - in other words: I'd endorse it.
 
Solid-Run also makes the ClearFog, however, I think the Community Board would be a better choice; especially because o the PCIe, the extra S-ATA connector and the 4GB RAM.
 
MQMaker's MiTi Board was mentioned as well, but it does not use an ARM-based CPU; this CPU is only a Dual-Core MIPS running at 880MHz, so it's probably not interesting.
 
The $39 Marvell EXPRESSOBin has 3 GMAC ports and 512MB RAM or 1GB RAM; Mini PCIe interface and USB3.0. Only one S-ATA interface, though.
 
There's also the LeMaker Cello board. This board has a Quad-Core Cortex-A57. It's not as quick as the Solid-Run board, but it does have some interesting specifications. If you need both a graphics card and an extra GMAC port, you could probably split the PCIe and add two cards there - or just connect the graphics card in the PCIe slot and add an external GMAC port on one of
the USB3 ports.
 
My opinion ... If you want a quality board and you can afford it, go for Solid-Run, but since you mention that it should be "affordable", then I guess you'd hesitate on that one.
If you have very little funds, the $39 board will probably be able to do the job. Again, there's no built-in HDMI and thus no hardware graphics accelerator.
 
Above, I've not mentioned the Western Digital My Cloud EX2100 and EX4100 NAS. These have Marvell chipsets and cost around $400 - as they have a complete enclosure and space for 2 or 4 harddisks (you can stuff up to 4 x 8 GB in the EX4100), they might be interesting to you.
 
Also, you may consider attaching a second Fast Ethernet via USB, so you have one Gbit and one 100Mbit Ethernet. Good GMACs are able to transfer up to 125MB/sec; bad 100Mbit are able to transfer only up to 10MB/sec. "Up to" means: This never really hapens. If you want fast connections just in order to be able to download quickly from the net, you need to remember that when you've upgraded your line to 10Gbit Fiber and you have extremely fast hardware, the servers you connect to and download from may be connected via a slow connections. Quick internal Ethernet connections on your LAN for accessing NAS or SAN is a good investment, but a fast internet connection may be waste of money. On a 100Mbit line I usually get 2MB/sec if I'm lucky. On rare occasions I've seen 4MB/sec.
 
Anyone who have better suggestions (perhaps a single board that satisfies all the requirements), please chip in!

Hello!
Sorry for too high-level description, I'm not an experienced embedded engineer, just an enthusiast.
 
I'm going to try to run a project to build an affordable home video recorder/player and I need a brief insight on the current ones available. I'm currently using A20 and I'm looking for a possible more powerful solutions.
 
Requirements:
 - At least twice powerful computing power comparing to A20
 - Video chip with hardware acceleration support in Linux (not planning to use Android)
 - SATA with at least 40 Megabytes per second throughput (NOT crappy usb<->sata built-in adapters)
 - Network stack with at least 300Mbps bandwidth that does NOT affect CPU performance (like in Banana Pi). Ideally, 2 separated NICs
 
Ideally to be able to use several displays.
 
Maybe it sounds naive, but Is there anything on the market that can do it?
 
Thank you in advance!

Ok. Found the following tricks:
 
1) Learn the current state of the HDMI monitor
apt-get install read-edid
get-edid > /tmp/edid
 
If monitor is not plugged, you'll get something like this:
Attempting to use i2c interface
No EDID on bus 0
No EDID on bus 1
No EDID on bus 2
No EDID on bus 3
No EDID on bus 4
Looks like no busses have an EDID. Sorry!
I'm sorry nothing was successful. Maybe try some other arguments
if you played with them, or send an email to Matthew Kern <pyrophobicman@gmail.com>. If monitor is plugged, you'll get something like this:
This is read-edid version 3.0.2. Prepare for some fun.
Attempting to use i2c interface
No EDID on bus 0
No EDID on bus 1
No EDID on bus 2
No EDID on bus 3
1 potential busses found: 4
256-byte EDID successfully retrieved from i2c bus 4
Looks like i2c was successful. Have a good day.
Checksum Correct Additionally, when connect a device to HDMI, the following is passed to the kernel:
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.680012] ParseEDID
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.704694] EDID version: 1.3
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.717744] PCLK=148500000 X 1920 2008 2052 2200 Y 1080 1084 1089 1125 fr 60 PP
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.745364] Unimplemented SVD code 4
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.747896] Unimplemented SVD code 2
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.750510] Unimplemented SVD code 17
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.756376] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 53900000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.762219] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 53900000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.768145] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 108100000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.773970] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 25150000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.779820] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 74200000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.785646] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 74600000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.791688] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 146850000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.797640] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 172900000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.803466] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 78800000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.809311] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 53450000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.815144] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 27100000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5556.821092] disp_clk: Could not find a matching pll-freq for 26150000 pclk
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.006753] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 16 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.019037] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 31 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.031524] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 5 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.043727] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 20 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.056109] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 4 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.068279] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 19 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.080507] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 3 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.092683] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 18 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.104805] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 2 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.116842] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 17 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.128831] Parse_VideoData_Block: VIC 1 support
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.140681] Parse_AudioData_Block: max channel=2
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.152796] Parse_AudioData_Block: SampleRate code=7
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.165050] Parse_AudioData_Block: WordLen code=7
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.176686] Find HDMI Vendor Specific DataBlock
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.190211] PCLK=27000000 X 720 736 798 858 Y 480 489 495 525 fr 59 NN
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.206142] PCLK=74250000 X 1280 1390 1430 1650 Y 720 725 730 750 fr 60 PP
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.222220] PCLK=27000000 X 720 736 798 858 Y 480 489 495 525 fr 59 NN
Aug 3 01:33:32 nx1 kernel: [ 5557.237922] PCLK=27000000 X 720 732 796 864 Y 576 581 586 625 fr 50 NN  
2. Turn on/off HDMI 
Use this utility:
https://github.com/doozan/a10-tools
 
a10_display hdmi off|on