This generation doesn't know how to shoe horses. And they're terrible with cave drawings.
Get a Lenovo TS140 for $219 (http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkServer-70A4000HUX-i3-4130-Computer/dp/B00F6EK9J2) - it uses ECC, is quiet, fairly low power, and has more than enough horsepower.
That comes with 4GB - throw in another 4GB for ~$55.
That's diskless. Throw in three WD Red 2TBs for under $100 each, and install the OS on a USB drive. That would give you a 4TB RAIDZ setup with one drive of parity. Closer to $600, but that's cheap for a system that actually has ECC RAM in it.
Worth noting that the Ubuntu repo still has the 6.0.1 version, which has critical security issues, and the developer can't get it removed or updated.
You won't be able to get away with an ARM system like RasPi as others have mentioned, but you might find a few semi-small x86 options.
Minnowboard has a 4.2" square board based on the Atom 640, but no IDE, and it's maybe $200. (http://www.minnowboard.org/technical-features/)
The best combination of cheap/small is probably Mini-ITX, at 6.7" square. An average mboard is maybe $50, plus a processor, RAM, power, and everything else. But you also won't have IDE, and you'll run into all of the usual driver support issues.
There are Nano, Pico, and Mobile-ITX, but you're going to raise the price almost exponentially with each jump down. Pico-ITX boards are at least $200-300.
It's a Toyota/BMW comparison. The Advantage is a mechanical keyboard, with Cherry Brown switches, while the Microsoft is membrane switches. There's a lot more tactile feel to the switches, and they keys themselves don't wear and fade like the MS one. It's slightly louder, but it's also not as mushy. It's fairly easy to take apart and clean, too.
The one big thing about the Advantage is that aside from the two key banks being completely split from each other, they are in "wells" that curve inward, and some of the most-used non-alpha keys (space, modifiers, enter, backspace) are on banks under your thumbs. It's a learning curve, and if you don't touch-type, it's a steep one. But it's a huge comfort difference.
I used to swear by the MS Naturals, and would burn through one a year. I switched to the Kinesis four years ago, and it still looks and feels almost brand new.
It's most likely that the three different platforms mentioned were developed and evangelized by three different teams at Samsung that never talked to each other. Each team probably thinks their solution is *the* solution.
When I worked at Samsung, divisions were heavily siloed, and often the first time you heard about what they were doing was when you saw it on a news site. Even within the same platform, teams were heavily divided. Our software dev outreach teams didn't even have a way to talk to the hardware design teams.
> You can make Mercedes profit if you sell VW volume.
Too bad VW doesn't make Mercedes profit selling VW volume, or this would be a great analogy.
Does anyone remember when 486SX computers came and it was a big deal that you could later upgrade the processor to a 486DX computer, making them totally modular and cool, and then like ten seconds later, Intel came out with the Pentium with a completely different bus and the entire system was obsolete? That's about what this sounds like. The second you get in your hands the all-updatable 64-bit system, every phone moves to 128-bit chips and you're stuck with half as many pins on your plugs just to get your phone up to current technology.
The best way to accelerate a Macintoy is at 9.8 meters per second per second.