On Wed, 30 May 2012, Trent W. Buck wrote:
I've been meaning to write a blog post on it, if nothing else other than to say "don't buy thecus unless you're prepared to put a lot of work in".
Ha, I just tell people "do not buy" and leave it at that :-)
It's the best specced *hardware* in that price bracket though. 1G (or was it 2G?) of ram in the 4200! (and I replaced it with 4G; vs a maximum of 256M in the qnap). Strangely, their crappy hacked up 2.6.32 kernel is 32 bit, but the atom D525 instruction set is 64bit (and that's what debian I have installed).
For home I *have* been meaning to look at sourcing a SFF box that can run Debian, take 2 or 3 3.5" SATA drives in an mdadm RAID1 or 5, and then shove that out to the LAN as NFS/SFTP/HTTP...
On ozbargains, the HP microserver has been popping up a few times for circa $200 to $250. With the 4G in my thecus, I can (and do) afford to run zfsonlinux :) The n4200pro came with a battery backup too so you could presumably get away with turning off write barriers. But LiIon, so will only last a few years. Meanwhile, I was thinking of buying a non volatile memory pci card to stick in the spare slot for zil/l2arc, but they're kinda pricey and small. I don't like SSD on principle, because I want it to last more than 4 years before I run out of write. -- Tim Connors