My advice is to get a Raspberry Pi and tinker with it and don't worry about the low I/O performance. There are some good reasons to go this route. One of the b

My advice is to get a Raspberry Pi and tinker with it and don't worry about the low I/O performance. There are some good reasons to go this route. One of the best is the amazing support the community around it offers. Another is the existing software that's available now to do what you want. And... not too long ago the Raspberry Pi Foundation made their "Raspbian OS" available to run on both Mac and PC hardware. So you've got a solid path to upgrade your hardware if you feel it's not fast enough for. A used Mac Mini might be a great choice. Small, quiet, low power consumption, and plenty fast enough. I'm still using my late `09 Mac Mini as my dev work box. I maxed out the RAM to 8GB and installed an SSD drive with 350GB of storage a couple years ago and it runs great. My plan is to install Raspbian on it when Apple obsoletes it and they're in the process of doing that now.