Banana Pi is a brand of single-board computers in the Raspberry Pi mould, an early Pi alternative that stood out for onboard SATA and gigabit Ethernet.1
Overview
The first Banana Pi boards matched the Pi’s size and 40-pin GPIO header but added a SATA port and gigabit networking, making them attractive for small file servers. The range has since grown to cover many ARM SoCs and, more recently, RISC-V boards. As with other clones, Linux support varies by model and is generally less polished than the Raspberry Pi’s.
Where it fits
Banana Pi sits among the Pi alternatives — Orange Pi, ODROID, Rock Pi — and is worth a look when you want a disk and wired networking on one cheap board. For a GopherTrunk setup that both captures and serves decoded data, the built-in SATA can host the storage without a USB adapter hanging off the board.