Router and file server are two very different things. I recently went through similar process. Even though at work I use Atom servers (naturally running OpenBSD amd64 port) for all our core network infrastructure and services I entertain the idea of buying non amd64 hardware. I looked at the state of armv7 port. I vetted all PR claims about Ubiquiti ERLite-3 and ended up buying this
http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D2500CCE-Mini-ITX-Motherboard as a router for my home network. (Don't worry the board is available and you can buy it from Amazon). File server is more interesting problem in my opinion. At work I use ZFS as our main file system to store data and run dozen of FreeBSD file servers. I also tested DragonFlyBSD and HAMMER1. I am three-way split when it comes to a home file server. 1. I don't like diversity at home so OpenBSD would be the first choice. 4TB HDD are cheap enough and I could mirror (RAID 1) all my personal data on two of them. There are two options for mirroring. Either use softraid or get a cheap used Areca hardware RAID card of e-bay. Those cards according to man pages have excellent support on OpenBSD (they are true open hardware). Use one of inexpensive Celeron based motherboards (you can get them under $50). I would be curious what OpenBSD gurus have to say about their experience with Areca on OpenBSD and building a OpenBSD file server in general. 2. Use the same hardware as above with DFBSD but take advantage of HAMMER1. You could use just 2HDD. Set master PFS in one hard disk and a slave PFS in the other disk. For more than 2 disks I would use Areca hardware RAID cards. Note that HAMMER1 is network aware so it is tempting to set up slave PFS on a remote machine. 3. Just use ZFS/FreeBSD as I am doing at work. End up paying big bucks for Celeron or Atom motherboard which supports ECC RAM and at least 8 perhaps 16 GB of it. You will not find those for $100 and the RAM ain't going to be cheap either. You might want to consider HBA like LSI SAS 9211-8i (those themself cost on e-bay around $100). This is by far the most expensive solution. Having a "proper" remote backup using ZFS replication would involve seting up two such server. Predrag
