What I miss on those boxes is storage and extendibility.

For years I'm searching for a low-power system which has lots of PCI-slots and can work with at least 4 harddrives. There are a lot of uses for such a machine. For example as a meshed WLAN router, or as an IPTV server. Both applications don't really need a lot of processing power, but a lot of PCI-slots. The second even needs a lot of harddrive storage.

Must get some of these for my home-made space shuttle..

What on earth are all these measurements about? Can we have it in something less 70s (e.g. metric) please?

Thanks for the heads up on Linksys NSLU2. I'm looking now to find them in the UK!

Anyone find anywhere which sells the Micro Servers ?

"As far as we can tell, your best bet for going small will rely on wares from Plat'Home and Buffalo Technology."

search for "single board computer", there are quite a few others - for example:

http://www.soekris.com/

http://www.bwi.com/index

http://www.pcengines.ch/wrap.htm

http://www.mikrotik.com/

most are geared towards router/access point type applications, but most also have options for storage (CF cards, 2.5" drives, etc.)

This is also sold by a typical Japanese vendor

Here are some Japanese manufacturer/vendor ethics to consider:

- Any change demanded by a customer is considered wagamama.

selfish is the closest translation but it is more like an insult that you as the customer ask the manufacturer to change something in his product because the manufacturer knows everything better so the customer should just do his job which is handing over money and shutting up.

- Artificial constraints ? Well why would the manufacturer remove that ? That way you will not buy the next model. We are still talking about Japan yes ? The country where replacing my hard disk in my toshiba would have set me back around 50 000 Yen. Finding the exact hard disk on ebay and installing it my self amounted to 8000 Yen.

-Drop the price. Wrong wrong wrong If you are not paying a lot you don't get quality. Japanese products are for some reason more expensive in Japan (with 5% sales tax than say Belgium with 21% sales tax). In general the Japanese consumers will pay whatever without even thinking if the price/product-you-get ratio is acceptable.

Obvious AC since I still have to live here

Want something lower Wattage? Any Linx box with a network connection can be presesed into service as a "data center" and if you don't need too much storage, you could run a small ARM Linux board with flash memory etc and get something going for less than 3W.

The smallest web server I've seen is http://d116.com/ace/ and only uses a few mW that it can steal form the RS232 wires. You could fit a few thousand of those in a shoebox. Of course this stretches the definition of "data center" somewhat.

"The LinkStation Mini uses a pair of 5,400RPM 2.5 inch notebook drives to perform its magic, making it the only Buffalo storage unit not to run on SATA drives"

Not true, many of the kuroboxes support PATA/IDE, and also the previous line of Linkstations (HGLAN) which ran on PPC. I have no preference between SATA and PATA as neither of them are bottlenecks.

Unfortunately the newer ARM9 models running at 400mhz are much slower at applications than the older 266mhz PPC models. Never the less, I have mine running Apache, SSH, Asterisk (the Callweaver branch), OpenVPN, and Samba for file share. When I only had one Linkstation, I connected USB hard disks to it for back up, now I have an RSync script between multiple Linkstations.

I have looked at many products for low end server platforms for running trivial daemons on a LAN. I bought the Linkstations explicitly to install Debian. In my opinion the Linkstations are the best value I've seen for this purpose.

For instance the Linksys NSLU units mentioned above only have 16meg RAM, while most Linkstations have 128meg. It might not affect their intended purpose, but when you configure a GraphicsMagick thumbnail cron job, that ram helps.

I have heard bad things about Buffalo's customer service, and unlocking them isn't "supported", so it's not for those who don't know what they're doing. That said, the unlocked Linkstations are so cool. Check out linkstationwiki.net for ideas/code.

When the article started I couldn't help but thinking a Mac mini cannot be too far away from these specs, however, I was wrong.

A similarly sized Mac mini uses a max of 110watts (probably during burning a DVD) and works at up to 95 degrees F.

Of course it offers a dvi out port, which these don't offer, as well as a higher power CPU. But still limited in expandability.

Ok, so this is a nice piece of kit. I'd be curious how quickly a few of these setup in a grid could encode video for me. The last video project I did took over 14 hours to encode on a Core 2 Duo CPU.

Just get a WD World 1TB unit and hack it to run ssh. It's got an ARM processor and 32MB RAM and runs linux. It also costs less than €250 which you can put towards the electricity bill.

I've been running one of these...

http://www.norhtec.com/products/mcjr/details.html

... for a 151 days now, according to top.

200Mhz Pentium compatible with 128Mb ram 80Gb of laptop drive fitted and it's virtually silent. I'd expect Windows XP would run (or at least crawl) on it but I'm using Debian Linux.

Only problem is the painful buying process.

This is the box that fatgadget are selling for USD. 500. But once you've bought one, what then? It won't run windows, solaris, hp-ux or any other other commercial operating system (I said commercial, for the linux boys & girls). if you do want to run Linux applications, you'll have to port them to it's PPC architecture and squeeze them into the 128MB of memory. Once there, then what?

These things can't interact with the outside world - except through the spare ethernet port - no digital I-O, no serial/parallel ports - not even a USB.

If you want to do real work in an embedded environment, buy a TINI or a dedicated embedded system.

If you are thinking of gettig one of these, save your money. Buy a housebrick and paint it white. it'll have the same functionality, be cheaper and use less power. ................ summary: pointless

"What about shoebox recommendations? Every good datacenter needs a good housing, and well, who in the IT world knows anything about shoeboxes?"

s/shoebox/sandalbox/g

"This is the box that fatgadget are selling for USD. 500."

Which one is?

"But once you've bought one, what then? It won't run windows, solaris, hp-ux or any other other commercial operating system (I said commercial, for the linux boys & girls)."

Plenty of commercial Linux systems available since, oh, 1995 or so.

"if you do want to run Linux applications, you'll have to port them to it's PPC architecture"

By compiling them. Not very hard.

"and squeeze them into the 128MB of memory."

That's plenty for a data server.

"Once there, then what?

These things can't interact with the outside world - except through the spare ethernet port "

Well, since they're intended for ethernet networks, that appears reasonable.

"- no digital I-O, no serial/parallel ports - not even a USB."

Ie, no pointless ports the target market doesn't want.

"If you want to do real work in an embedded environment, buy a TINI or a dedicated embedded system."

Fine. Did you especially want to talk about embedded systems? Perhaps posting to an article about embedded systems would be a good idea; this is about data servers.

"If you are thinking of gettig one of these, save your money. Buy a housebrick and paint it white. it'll have the same functionality, be cheaper and use less power. ................ summary: pointless"

Summary: Pete has no idea what he's talking about.

apparently this brick^H^H^H^H^Hcomputer does have a couple of USB ports, and a whopping 8 BITs of digital I-O. I apologise for my earlier ommission and would like to correct my summary of the device. Paint a housebrick white and tie a USB cable around it. You can then use either one as an anchor for a model boat - there: it does have a use, afterall.

To even hint at the possibility of using it in a datacentre (except possibly as a doorstop) is laughable. Although the article does admit that the box "limps along ...". I already have boxes that perform all the functions this thing claims (ref: mini-itx). I've been using them for years. They're cheaper, more flexible and support a greater range of O/S, being "proper" PC architectures 'n'all.

Probably the best use for this product is what Buffalo suggest (top of page 2): aim it at windows - preferably someone else's.

"A savvy and admittedly deranged admin, however, could take this tiny hardware and build a very energy-efficient data center in a desk drawer."

Crikey, Ashlee, that's a bit harsh/rich, especially coming from El Reg. Now an AEStranged admin, however, who are very, very crafty and have a liberal use of the word 'supersubatomic', would lead with many factoring advices, for tasks geared as Mother and Nature intended, rather than as cowards deploy ..... for Ye Ole Seemly Seamless Godisagoddess Paradigm Shift into Parallel Dimensions for Overall SuperComputing Control[s].

And that would be right up the Japanese DRM Psyche which when tempered with the Delights of the Perfumed Garden Lotus Blossoms/Houses of the Rising Sun, would Capture and Hold any Heart and Mind.

I think that Pete's point is that it ain't gonna be doing very much, not really good qualification for a "data centre" data server however is different, data servers don't have to do much.

Both guys have points to make, and both valid but for different reasons.

Pete says "these apples are rubbish" Robert says "no, these oranges are spot on"

I guess the difference is that you can get a NSLU2 for about £50 (as usual just convert U.S dollar sign to £ and you get the UK price) whereas the cheapest QNAP boxes seem to start @ about £110??

I wanted to build a standalone system which does XYZ over ethernet but single board computers, embedded systems etc all start at about £100 with a possibility of not being able to use linux wheras you can pickup the NSLU2 cheap and know its gonna work. Rebox it, install your app, job done!

I have also been looking at all the old thin clients you can get on ebay for about £10 each which usually have 200-300mhz processors but it seems hit and miss getting linux to run on them which is a shame! I found some documentation on putting it on the *something* T20 models but it looked like quite a lot of work!

Seán is spot on, I have a WD 1Tb MyBook, new cost me £169, with a simple URL 'hack' you have a nice 1Tb Linux system, not very powerful, but huge disk, passive cooling, gig ethernet, small, runs Samba/SSH/webserver and bittorrent client. (if you don't mind a bit of work), great for a 'micro' server and storage is USB expandable too!

Well after spending forever looking around and commenting on this post, I decided to give the "Infineon ADM5120" a go from omnima.co.uk. I found them on the openwrt forum and decided I might as well give it a go. It was only £19 although I decided to buy the usb key with the OS already installed for £7 (if im happy with it then I can just buy my own keys from ebuyer for like £4 and do it myself).

Its only 175mhz with 16mb but it beats trying to fight protection a manufacturer has put on a router and its near enough the same as ebay prices. I only want to run some basic python web scraping scripts and sell it as a device so it should be fine and it works out to be about £25 for a full system you can sell on ..

£19 - board

£2.50 - power cable

£4 - usb 1gb (could prob go lower/cheaper than this!)

£xyz box...

The NSLU2 isn't a router, and it's not a fight, just grab the debian installer image and use the NSLU2's "firmware upgrade" option on the administration page. It's 266MHz & 32MB, which still isn't much I guess.

It's been out a few years, anyone know of a similarly low-priced and hackable NAS that's a bit beefier?

This coming from people whose main currency is based on 373.241721 grams of silver.

What OS are you using on the slug?

I went straight to debian (I'm sure uNSLUng and SlugOS are great but debian is what I know) and the platform is now fully supported. In fact, after x86, I think it's their most popular.

Go on, go debian, you know you want to!