I got a banana pi last week using alibaba. It was $59 shipped and arrived in about a week from my order (China-Portland airmail is typically extremely fast). here’s a link to the store I used:
here is a link to the image files available for it:
http://www.lemaker.org/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=9&id=38
I used “raspberry pi for banana pi” which is actually just raspbian with a hacked-in kernel and uboot for the allwinner A20. It extracted as an image file that I wrote with win32diskimager. It requried an 8GB SD card which is too bad because it only uses 2.6GB when installed.
I got this thing to be a new samba and transmission-deamon server, as my raspberry pi is a bit slow (4.5MB/s typical samba read/write). Using a SATA drive formatted to ext4 I’m getting about 22MB/s writes to the banana pi over gigabit ethernet. This is on a drive that can do maybe 25-30MB/s writes locally. It maxes out cpu usage one of the cores so I think it’s cpu-limited and might get a bit faster with some tuned samba options. It’s plenty fast, no complaints, and I’m betting I won’t ever have to pause torrents again just to stream 1080p video like I did on the raspberry pi (as it will have one core for each task).