orange pi

tl;dr: The ODROID-C2 is a very solid competitor to the Raspberry Pi model 3 B, and is anywhere from 2-10x faster than the Pi 3, depending on the operation. The software and community support is nowhere near what you get with the Raspberry Pi, but it's the best I've seen of all the Raspberry Pi clones I've tried.

tl;dr: The Orange Pi Plus offers much better specs, and much better performance, than a similarly-priced Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately—and this is the case with most RPi competitors at this time—setup, hardware support, and the smaller repository of documentation and community knowledge narrow this board's appeal to enthusiasts willing to debug annoying setup and configuration issues on their own.

A few months ago, I bought an Orange Pi Plus from AliExpress. It's a single-board Linux computer very similar to the Raspberry Pi, with a few key differences:

To use eMMC modules on the Orange Pi, Radxa, Milk-V, etc. as a writable volume in Linux, you need to delete the existing partitions (on my old Orange Pi, it was formatted as FAT/WIN32), create a new partition, format the partition, then mount it:

1. Delete the existing partitions, and create a new partition:
   1. sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk1
   2. p to list all partitions, then d and a number, once for each of the existing partitions.
   3. n to create a new partition, then use all the defaults, then w to write the changes.
2. Format the partition: sudo mkfs.ext4 -L "emmc" /dev/mmcblk1p1
3. Create a mount point: sudo mkdir -p /mnt/emmc
4. Mount the disk: sudo mount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /mnt/emmc

Note your eMMC device may be a different ID, e.g. mmcblk2 or mmcblk0, depending on the order the board firmware loads multiple devices in. Check with lsblk to see which device you would like to modify.