R9000 may not be a good fit, but there are many other options available. Much better than Pi for routing duties too.
What are your requirements? Your expectations? Your environment?
What is your current router and client device overview?
I currently have a r7500v2 with the latest DD-WRT nightly. I am using a WD 12TB easystore (the USB 3.0 interface) as a Samba share. I have been unable to get more than 45MB/s access either way, which started me looking for options.
I then started looking into the pineboards and the rockchip 3399, and into some mediatek stuff. All of it looks very exciting to play with, but upon reading the forums and finding out that certain things to do not work and on many of the boards you only have eMMC as a boot option (which takes normal installation out of the picture). To make it worse every board has different quirks, and each board has more boot options while others do not.
I am currently thinking about the nanopc t4, but the information about the wifi chip is no where to be found yet.
I am not a business, and my resources are very limited. Essentially what I am using off storage for is to back up photos, and videos, and all my overflow projects where I was working on source code and gave up interest and abandoned the project (LoL).
I am currently using netgear 7500v2 as my samba server, but the performance over USB3.0 is abysmal. I am thankful it works mind you, I mean this is open source after all and if anything works at all it is usually a benevolent miracle. I want to eventually get another 12TB drive to mirror the first and one more drive as my spare dump drive for all my clutter. These SBC's seem a very good place to start do this, and some of them even come with pre-made cases. So keeping the cost down and providing me a way to update the software seems like a plus plus. I could run openmediavault or something else and possibly even use it as a mediocre wifi ap later on down the road.
My environment is just a limited budget tinkerer that is willing to experiment.
What I am looking for is something that will give me the maximum speeds that gigabit is supposedly rated for, instead of 1/3rd like the netgear 7500v2 is giving me. 1-5% difference for me is not really something I would quibble over. At first I thought my speed problems might be cable/switch related, but I put a known good cat6 cable straight from my computer to the 7500v2 and I am still maxing out at 45MB/s. The device in question easily gets over 130MB/s if connected locally through sata or USB 3.0 on the same enclosure. So you can see why I am looking.
