[ALUG] Good NAS boxes for Linux?

[Wayne Stallwood]

I'll second the recommendation of the Mini-ITX route and using
Linitx.com

My previous home media server was a N10000 board in a 1U case with a
couple of drives hanging off it. Worked really well and despite also
running my mail, a couple of websites and a upnp media server I never
had performance issues. The only reason I upgraded was because I wanted
RAID and the Mini-ITX machine didn't have the internal space or enough
drive interfaces to do what I want.

On a side note I do have a PIII 866 box in a SFF case that was actually
a gigabyte NAS appliance in a previous life and then became my first
media server..it may or may not have the >136GB drive limitation I can't
be sure, there is also a slight complication during installation in that
it is headless in the true sense (no VGA connector or PS/2 ports) So you
have to either figure out how to do an installation with a serial
console or do a basic installation on another machine or as I did, plug
in a PCI gfx card for installation and stick a keyboard on the internal
USB header.

Free to a good or bad home, or it is probably going skipside in the new
year

Of course the other option is a NSLU2 with debian installed and a beefy
USB hard drive, but then we are talking two boxes, limited performance
and a bit of clutter.