Apex

Buy.com
has a great price on this fast NAS system, able to hold up to four SATA drives. 
Supports RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10.  Also includes two eSATA ports and two USB 2.0
ports. 

INTEL ENTRY STORAGE SYSTEM SS4200-E NAS SERVER DEAL

• Review 1: 
  
  TOM'S HARDWARE REVIEW


• Review 2: 
  
  SMALLNETBUILDER REVIEW

BareMetal

I have 4 of these in use at work and 1 at home. These come standard with a basic NAS operating system based on linux. It works well for what it is intended for, but we use these things for so much more.

First lets start of with the one I have at home. I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB and installed via slip stream, windows home server. Installed in the system is 3 1 TB Hard drives and I have an 8 bay E-SATA cabinet plugged into it and it works very well for this purpose.

At work I use 2 these as backup servers. I installed a full version of linux (Debian 5 Lenny). These are running two different backup server software on them. One has a 1 GB memory upgrade and the other has 2 GB. Both systems have 4 2 TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration for 6 TB of space to use. These things are so versatile.

Upgrade options are the following:
Memory up to 2GB
Processor up to a E2200 2.2 GHZ dual core Intel
Hard Drives 4 2 TB drives internal, 2 E-SATA ports (4 drives each), and 4 USB ports for exteneral HD's

The only thing this thing does not have is video. However there is a 2x PCI express slot on the mother board and a case hack to use it for video.

Note for installing other operating systems.

For windows you will need to hack in a video card or slip stream the install.. works great for home server

For linux you can install a serial cable (there are pins on the mother board for this) and use a terminal program to see a text base screen for the install.

do a simple google search and all of the info is out there.

Jeffbx

Wow, sounds fun! Grabbed one just for kicks.

Apex

Sounds like a great box you built up there, BareMetal.

__________________
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin (1914 - )

BareMetal

$49 dollars later for a dual core 2200 off of ebay and now I've turned one of these into a vmware server hosting my two windows servers (domain controller and exchange server 2007 on windows 2008) and two linux debian servers (Maia MailGuard and MailArchiva). Now this is only a test environment, but this just shows what you can do with these boxes. This system has 4 1 TB drives a dual core proc and 2 GB mem. Total price 553 dollars I have created the perfect test / training environment. with all systems running and using the over commit option of VMware I have 5 GB of memory allocated to virtual machines with only 1 GB of physical memory used, meaning that I can add more virtual systems than I currently have running.

Jeffbx

Still waiting for my 4x1TB drives...