A while ago I have started looking for a more energy efficient way of storing my electronic waste. I do have a big server tower now with a bunch of SATA drives in it, and over the winter its warming effects on the temperature in my office have been appreciated. However, current hard drive prices have made it so that a pair of 1TB drives in a RAID1 configuration can provide me with the needed storage space at a cost that will be easily recuperated from the savings created by turning off this 450W energy hog.

The default option would be to get a USB 2.0 enclosure, connect it to an old laptop, and use the laptop to serve my NFS and samba needs. However, USB 2.0 is slow and I have managed to stress out the usb-storage driver in more than one occasion. This solution is not much on confidence, not much on speed, I'll try to avoid it for as long as possible. (also, e-sata and laptops don't quite mix...)

The next option is a dedicated dual drive NAS. The two contenders here seem to be the Linksys NAS200 and the D-Link DNS-323. Looking over the interwebs it seems that the general consensus is the Linksys device is rather slow. So off I went and I purchased the D-Link one.

That turned out to be a mistake, as the DNS-323 proved to be unable to recover from a simple RAID1 rebuild/simulated hard drive crash test. It didn't lose data, but I couldn't get the device to rebuild the RAID1 array and keep it from going into degraded mode until I reformatted. Not only that, after the simulated failure, it became very unstable, timing out and giving random read only and permission denied errors as I attempted to test working with the device in degraded mode.

I really liked the form factor of the DNS-323 though. That is basically what I am looking for - not much bigger than two hard drives put together, temperature sensor, quiet fan that adjusts its speed based on how much cooling is needed.

I guess it is time to start looking at the Mini PCs. It's hard to believe that what I would like to have is that "far out" and that nobody has attempted to develop something along these lines:
- dual 3.5" drive support
- gigabit ethernet
- small, really small form factor
- x86 based, prefer freedos to windows vista
- no monitor, don't care about graphics performance
- ~50W power consumption
Hardware folks, please design something like that and I shall buy.... at least one.