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Kurobox Pro is the only NAS out there I know of that officially supports running Debian, Gentoo, or their own distro (I think it is based on Montavista linux). It has an ARM9 proc, 128 MB of RAM, 256 meg of onboard flash for the firmware, SATA connection for HD, gigabit NIC, and a PCI-Express x1 slot. It is a lot more than you are looking for price-wise though, $169. It is very similar to the Buffalo Linkstation Pro, but with a slightly different design, larger onboard flash (the LS-PRO needs a hard drive to store most of the OS), and a PCI-express port. Personally owning a hacked one I can say it is far faster than an NSLU2.

It is a bit smaller than the MSI Wind nettop mentioned by someone else, and probably uses less power. However, I'm sure the MSI is much faster with its Atom proc and larger RAM capacity.

u mean this?
http://www.revogear.com/
These are ARM based, you can move them around, but they're no laptops.

How about a Kurobox? You could put a 500Gb hard drive in it, or even a 750Gb drive if you were inclined. You'll still have enough left in your budget for a secondary USB drive that you can use for backing it up.

Check out the Kuro Box at http://www.revogear.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=KURO-BOX%2FPRO

Compared to running a PC, it uses less space and electricity. You won't RAID, but it's pretty good at what it does.

If you are just looking for a server etc. The Kurobox

http://www.revogear.com/

is the way to go. No unneeded peripherals like a video, sound, etc to generate heat and suck up power. Just an ethernet and USB port. Plus, it holds a standard 3.5" drive. I use mine as a Web Server for story photos with Gallery, DNS server, DHCP server, music server (for Slimdvices Squeezebox), Video server (for Hauppague Media MVP), Internet proxy and print server (with LPD and ghostscript) without any speed issues.

I have been looking for similar reasons at this kind of thing. I think I am going to go for a Linkstation by Buffalo. It is a network attached storage device which has quite a lively hardware hacking community, mainly because it runs linux and is easily reflashable.

I also want to run the slimserver and there are details on how to run it on this hardware here (depending on whether you have the MIPS version or the PPC version). You can upgrade the hard drive (though not officially) or if you want you can also use external USB2 hard drives as it has a couple of USB ports.

If you want the officially hackable version of this box, they sell a thing called the Kuro Box and they actively encourage hacking it.

HTH

BJPirt

Woud the KuroBox suit your purposes?

Hmm... the Revolution Store and main web site appear to be undergoing some sort of maintenance at the moment, but the wiki is still online...

I originally saw this on robots,net, but it looks like it might suit your needs...

I can't get to the article, but the summary lists Buffalo as a possible violator. If they are, I doubt it's intentional, since they released all their Kuro box code (which their linkstation is based off of) here .

It's a shame he hosted his project on Windows, I would have like to have seen it on OS X or Linux.

Where do you see that he hosted it on Windows? He hosted it on a Kuro Box, which is a Linux-based PPC device. The only role Windows plays is running the setup program to load the Kuro system image.

Actually, you can even get around that. Someone on the Kuro forum put together instructions for loading the system image from a Mac.

The Kuro Box is a pretty neat toy in it's own right. If you want to play around with Linux development on a PPC platform on the cheap, it's certainly the way to go.

It's a shame he hosted his project on Windows, I would have like to have seen it on OS X or Linux.

Where do you see that he hosted it on Windows? He hosted it on a Kuro Box, which is a Linux-based PPC device. The only role Windows plays is running the setup program to load the Kuro system image.

Actually, you can even get around that. Someone on the Kuro forum put together instructions for loading the system image from a Mac.

The Kuro Box is a pretty neat toy in it's own right. If you want to play around with Linux development on a PPC platform on the cheap, it's certainly the way to go.

It's a shame he hosted his project on Windows, I would have like to have seen it on OS X or Linux.

Where do you see that he hosted it on Windows? He hosted it on a Kuro Box, which is a Linux-based PPC device. The only role Windows plays is running the setup program to load the Kuro system image.

Actually, you can even get around that. Someone on the Kuro forum put together instructions for loading the system image from a Mac.

The Kuro Box is a pretty neat toy in it's own right. If you want to play around with Linux development on a PPC platform on the cheap, it's certainly the way to go.

I don't know about the average state of affairs in this regard, but let be mention a very interesting data point from my recent experience.

I just finished assembling a Kuro Box, which is a 200 Mhz PowerPC based NAS "kit". This thing runs Linux, is very customizable, and is also very fast and capable, considering it runs on a 17W power supply and is smaller than even the new PS2 boxes.

The fact that I can grab most of the standard Linux software and at least compile it myself to put on this box is just awesome to me. Once I had it set up, the whole environment was totally familiar to me and easy to use -- I forget that this isn't an x86 based box.

So, the fact that Linux is so portable among platforms is definitely a nice thing, and is useful for this very purpose. I was even able to grab a pre-built MySQL binary package from mysql.com and it just worked as-is. Neato!