I've been thinking about building a small NAS box for my father in law to back his home systems up to. He mistakenly bought a Drobo, but his Macs refuse to use it as a Time Machine target, even with the afp protocol.
I came across a review of the ASUS TS Mini, which comes with an Atom N280, 1GB RAM, 2 drive bays (one with a Seagate 7200.12 500gb drive), and lots of external ports. Photos in some review show an RGB port inside. Since it was cheap, I ordered one to play with. It's turned out to be a great small NAS and case. It's 9.5" high, 3.75" wide, and 8" deep. Power is from an external brick. The top is held on with thumb screws, which once removed let you pull out the drive cage. The bottom cover is held on by some philips screws. This also gives you access to the single DDR2 SO-DIMM slot. There are also solder pads for a second memory slot and for a PCIe 1x slot. If you're handy with a soldering iron, you could double your memory. Taking the back cover off lets you get at the VGA. You need to use a Torx-9 driver and remove the 8 or so screws, then loosen the motherboard to take it out. Once out, you can see that the RBG port can be trimmed out of the back plate with a razor or dremel. The two internal drives are connected to the ICH7-M southbridge. It looks like a sideways PCIe 1x slot on the motherboard, but it's the sata and power connectors for the internal drives, so don't think you can plug a different card in. The two external eSATA ports are provided via a Marvell 88SE6121 PCIe SATA controller, which supports PMP. There are also 6 USB ports on the back. All of this is supported by OpenSolaris. When booting with a monitor and keyboard attached, you can hit DEL to get into the BIOS and change any settings. There's nothing that prevents you from replacing the provided Windows Home Server. I've currently got the system running NexentaStor Community, booting off of a 4GB USB drive. Large writes (eg: DVD iso) go at about 20MB/s over GigE, and reads are about 40MB/s. It's not the fanciest or fastest system, but I think it'll work fine as an iSCSI target for Time Machine. And my FIL can even use the Drobo as external USB drives if he wants. -B -- Brandon High : bh...@freaks.com _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
