On NAS hardware boxes

As beloved by sbisson :-)

In a way, these are what a low-end Ubuntu fileserver are up against. Charlie Demerijian of L'Inq has some insightful comments:

EDIT: these are all from Thecus, BTW.
http://www.thecus.com/index.php

N4100
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=29281

N5200 pt 1
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36257

N5200 pt 2
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36262

Also see

N2100 review
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=27319

& from IDF
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=25645

At the moment, the Linux answer to this is is NASlite:
http://www.serverelements.com/

Only the most basic version is free, though. I'd love to build an Ubuntu NAS version as a side project!

If you're a BSD type, there's FreeNAS:
http://www.freenas.org/