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I've bee looking around for a relatively low cost 4-drive NAS appliance that could be hacked to run Linux (or further customized if it already did) or FreeBSD (FreeNAS w/ZFS). They're available, but once you get into 4-bay devices, they become disproportionately expensive (typically $600+), relative to the cost of the components they are built from. (A Western Digital ShareSpace can be found populated with only 2 drives for a bit over $300. A great deal, given the drives alone are worth $180 ~ $200, but it would need to be hacked in order to be customized.) Looking at the available components, if you want something compact and low power, the first challenge is finding a suitable enclosure. There's not much on the market for NAS appliances that isn't proprietary. I did find this Chenbro Mini ITX case with 4 hot-swap SATA trays: http://usa.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?sku=79 Not bad, but it departs from the typical cube design, instead turning the drives sideways, to create a narrow tower. The power supply is external, and the bays aren't trayless. For a hunk of sheet metal and a power supply, it's also a tad expensive at $160+. To get a NAS you need to add a Mini-ITX board to it, which is going to run another $140 (for a model w/4 SATA ports), plus CPU and RAM. The low-power oriented Mini-ITX boards with Atom CPUs ($75) don't support enough SATA ports. A PCI card might be an option. Then I ran across the VIA barebones systems specifically aimed at OEM and DIY NAS appliances. They've got a 2-bay model[1][2] that comes with a motherboard incorporating their 1.5 GHz VIA C7-D CPU, so it should be fairly power efficient (one review said 29 watts; low noise too: 26dB). They've also incorporated a CF slot for storing the embedded OS, which is great. That can be found for a bit over $200. Add some RAM and a CF card loaded with FreeNAS and you're good to go. A nice box, even if it uses an external power supply and you have to disassemble it to swap drives. You'd be hard pressed to find any other built-it-yourself solution that is as small, but commercial 2-bay NAS appliances that are well supported by hacks aren't that hard to find, and some are cheaper (D-Link DNS-321). (Though I suspect most are probably running slower CPUs, and many don't have GB Ethernet.) VIA also has an 8-bay version[3], which sounds like it uses similar controller hardware (same CPU) plus Wake-on-LAN, Wake-on-Alarm, watch dog timer, and of course 8 SATA ports. The case also comes with hot-swap trays and an internal power supply. This runs $600, which again seems disproportionate given that most of the difference is scaled up sheet metal. Now if they only had a 4-bay version... 1. http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/embedded/artigo/a2000/index.jsp 2. http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/03/11/review-via-artigo-a2000-barebone-storage-server/ 3. http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/embedded/nsd7800/ -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
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