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Your options are... limited.

The people who make 'ARM-based server motherboards' generally bundle them with cases and sell them as network attached storage devices. (Anything mentioned on the Debian on Orion or Debian on Kirkwood pages will be discussing ARM 'servers' based on those Marvel SoCs, some of which have a reasonable number of drive bays).

Some ARM dev boards will also break out an SATA port; but generally only one, (something like Freescale's i.MX53 dev board) as they usually focus on being dev boards, with the SATA port just there because dev boards usually populate all the pins the device can handle, not because you are supposed to use them for server work.

In the cheap seats, a small minority of the hackable tablet/set-top-box focused devices have SATA support. The Allwinner A10, which is cheap as dirt and all over the place, provides it; but substantially fewer devices break it out. The mele A1000 and A2000 are some of the few.

In practice, what you really are asking for doesn't exist(to my knowledge). Your best bet, today, is probably to find a NAS that suits you and has decent 3rd-party firmware support, and call it a day. Virtually nothing else has multiple drive support, and(while NAS devices can have a bit of sticker shock, dev boards aren't known for mass-market pricing, or for niceties like 'microATX form factor', so you'd end up having to hack on the case anyway).

There just isn't an ARM equivalent to, say, any of the cheap microATX Intel Atom or AMD APU based boards($60-$100 once you add some RAM) which draw a bit more power; but are almost insultingly capable in terms of peripherals and raw punch by comparison.

Your options are... limited.

The people who make 'ARM-based server motherboards' generally bundle them with cases and sell them as network attached storage devices. (Anything mentioned on the Debian on Orion or Debian on Kirkwood pages will be discussing ARM 'servers' based on those Marvel SoCs, some of which have a reasonable number of drive bays).

Some ARM dev boards will also break out an SATA port; but generally only one, (something like Freescale's i.MX53 dev board) as they usually focus on being dev boards, with the SATA port just there because dev boards usually populate all the pins the device can handle, not because you are supposed to use them for server work.

In the cheap seats, a small minority of the hackable tablet/set-top-box focused devices have SATA support. The Allwinner A10, which is cheap as dirt and all over the place, provides it; but substantially fewer devices break it out. The mele A1000 and A2000 are some of the few.

In practice, what you really are asking for doesn't exist(to my knowledge). Your best bet, today, is probably to find a NAS that suits you and has decent 3rd-party firmware support, and call it a day. Virtually nothing else has multiple drive support, and(while NAS devices can have a bit of sticker shock, dev boards aren't known for mass-market pricing, or for niceties like 'microATX form factor', so you'd end up having to hack on the case anyway).

There just isn't an ARM equivalent to, say, any of the cheap microATX Intel Atom or AMD APU based boards($60-$100 once you add some RAM) which draw a bit more power; but are almost insultingly capable in terms of peripherals and raw punch by comparison.

It's always amusing to see Debian fans complaining that the end users are always going for Ubuntu instead of "hey, why not choose Debian, it's the original and it's the best!" when Debian keeps making moves like this.

What moves? This is a release announcement. Do you mean that Debian should stop releasing stable versions?

It's already bad enough to think that a new Linux user would want a browser called "IceWeasel" or would understand that it's really just Firefox renamed because of some silly branding/icon tiff with the mozilla folks.

So go complain to Mozilla.

having a bunch of useful drivers removed

There are no drivers purposefully removed, FAFAIK. Are you referring to firmware, perhaps?

a nonstandard kernel!

Nonstandard? Are you referring to the kfreebsd kernel? It is very much standard as released by FreeBSD. Or do you mean the firmware-split in the Linux kernel? That feature has been upstream for years. Or maybe you mean that it's a non-NTOS kernel? I guess you're right on that one, but most Free people would consider that a plus.

Listen, it's ok to do stuff like this if you're really into teh sooper 100% free as in freedom rms-approved purity, but don't subsequently go complaining when ordinary end users don't want it because it's unusable to anyone other than a free software hacker.

Listen, it's ok to use any Linux you like, but don't subsequently go complaining when ordinary distributors release a Free operating system that you woudn't use.

Oh, and regarding Ubuntu: please get back to me when Ubuntu releases a supported server variant that runs on my NAS.

They don't require hacking, it's optional. Unless you count sshing into a Ubuntu box to configure it as hacking...... I moved mine from Ubuntu to Debian, and the guide for doing so is pretty clear: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/ I had a small issue, probably of my own making, but I solved it and learnt more about uBoot in the process. I don't what problems you had with the mini USB JTAG, again it's clearly documented. It is much much much more powerful then the 8bit AVR butterfly. A much better hack project to point people at is BeagleBoard (which now can run XBMC).

My one criticism is that those DNS-323's are really slow.

Its not that bad compared to most home other home NAS boxes though. Also if you put Debian on it the more recent kernels have had performance improvement work done by Marvell.

The two choices are scope-based releases or time-based releases. Scope-based releases allow for long delays, reduced confidence and morale. Time-based releases have been shown to be an effective tool in improving the quality and morale of large, complex open-source software.

But, don't take my word for it.
http://www.cyrius.com/publications/

I've just recently bought one of these - I've not done much more than install Debian and a LAMP server on it thus far but have come away thoroughly impressed with the kit. All the magical incantations you need to a) set the device up to boot from SD card and b) install debian to said SD card can be found here. In my case I needed to follow the instructions to update the u-boot system on the plug, but I presume by now they are shipping with the updated ROM in place.

Long term I intend to offload torrenting and streaming duties to the plug, attaching it to a NAS for storage... I have a few other ideas in mind additional to this, which may or may not require additional plugs, but at a cost of around £90 it's no great hardship :)

check out www.cyrius.com/debian/orion/qnap/ for this. Especially the TS-109 has good power specs (14W under load), and there is a Debian Howto on the referenced page. The system has a 500MHz ARM cpu. Its newer sibling, the TS-119 has a 1.2 GHz cpu but I couldn't find power specs for it (only that is has a 36W power supply).

Some more links:
Sheeva Plug review/picture: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/marvell-sheevaplug-plug-computing-linux,7104.html
Where to buy the Sheeva Plug: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-kit-us.aspx
Installing Debian on the Sheeva Plug: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/

Take a look at this page.

Martin Michlmayr is a debian contributor/porter/activist/whatever with a keen interest in these sorts of devices, he published some early power use figures.

But in short, yes, I think you'd save a lot of power. Though you'd have to buy an HDD caddy and take the power consumption of that into account. We're still likely talking about a lot less than a full PC.

As for it being possible - Using samba, a linux box can appear to windows machines in much the same way a windows machine does - with exposed shared directories and shared printers. It's fairly simple, though I've not done the printer bit for some time.

Aside from the cool geek factor, why load Debian? It's a distro optimized for servers.

Who told you that? My experience is that Debian's strength is in its versatility, rather than a focus on servers. Thats why it is seen in using for anything from the firmware-based Linksys NSLU2 to being the base of some of the most popular desktop distros of the past few years, suck as Knoppix and Ubuntu.

Having said that, the NSLU2 is end-of-life now and is a little limited (32MB of RAM). You might want to check out something a little more modern if you're interested in an always on low-power linux server:

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/orion/qnap/ts-109/

Though the comments are a bit inflammatory, they are pretty close to the truth.

Debian has been on ARM forever. I've got a NSLU2 from a couple of years ago running Debian with zero issues and fantastic performance. http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/

I fail to see where this improves Canonical's chances of turning a profit. Dell's deal sure doesn't seem to have helped them very much.

As long as I can admin it like a Debian distro, I'll take two. They aren't going to get rich at $250 ea., but if their landed cost is below $80 they will be in good shape as long as they have the capital to build some volume.

I run a now-discontinued nslu2 as a home network hub, arm-powered and ***plenty*** fast. http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/

The only time I've noticed any slow-down issues was when cups was generating certs for itself. Which is to be expected. It serves the printer, scanner, very advanced firewall, trustworthy dhcp serving, webdav file share, the list goes on... This box has VGA out, so I can make it a mythtv head.

I second this recommendation. I put Debian on mine and now it's totally intuitive. :)

If one may ask: why does it not look to you as though the DPL would have much power to change things?

It's just the general impression I got after reading a former DPL's blog note, written about a year ago.[1] It looks like the DPL needs to be a resourceful negotiator rather than a strong leader in order to push changes into debian. If he can "sell" his ideas to other developers and convince them that the kind of changes he wants to make are desirable and good for debian, then things start happening. But it will be very hard to persuade so many developers to agree on which new direction will be the best.

Take, for instance, the various proposals to improve the release methodologies for Debian.[2] I would very much like to see debian testing to become a constantly usable "rolling release" with "beta" snapshot releases (a la "DebianInstallerReleasesAreDebianReleases"). Then there could be the actual high quality stable releases just like they currently are, and unstable would stay the free playground for developers to break things and to introduce new ideas and new versions of software. But I doubt that this kind of big change in the release methodology would be possible for the DPL to push without causing major flame wars. ;)

[2] http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseProposals

Or the fact that of the few people who can vote (under 1000), and likely most of them don't have a clue they can vote, or there lives don't revolve around debian enough to be worried theres an election on.

Has anyone even seen this guy: http://www.cyrius.com/ .. yes he's the leader of Debian. Though I think debian really needs a leader who stands up and puts debian on the map, instead of looking like a group of geeks who isn't really relevant to the rest of the world.