The first of these problems is the lack of a display port, this complicates things a little bit, but not terribly. First of all there would be no troubleshooting available if there were install troubles. However given that FreeNAS is based off of m0n0wall which is in turn based off of FreeBSD and it's designed with hardware compatibility in mind it would be easy enough to simply DD the embedded image to a CF card or some small flash storage and plug it in inside the server and boot it up without having to worry too much about making sure it installs all the right drivers.

This presents yet two more problems, both of which are closely related. Where are we going to plug in the flash that will have the image? It probably won't have a PATA//IDE port but we'd never know until we looked inside. And how can we make sure it boots from the right drive? There's no BIOS to jump into and configure since there's no display port and even no serial port for doing this remotely. The only solution I could come up with is this: Hope that there's a spare SATA port, which there likely isn't since it's designed for 4 drives and SATA ports usually come in pairs and since 4 % 2 == 0 we're sort of back to square one. Now if for some odd reason the motherboard rolled for this appliance just *happened* to have an unused SATA port our problem is pretty much solved. We could simply move cable of the bottom bay (which has the preinstalled drive with WHS) to another port and plug in a small SATA flash storage device which the system would already have been configured to boot from.

Once that's all said and done we could simply just go to the web interface of the FreeNAS install and configure it how we like. Though you could theoretically modify the configuration before hand in a virtual machine. Mount the storage device to a virtual machine, boot and make changes you deem necessary then simply shutdown and plug the storage device into the easyStore. All the new hardware would automatically be detected and all would be well with the setup.

One other thing I've been considering is the possibility of using one of the new Display Link USB video adapters. Although I'm very skeptical of the idea that this would work without drivers installed in a minimally functioning mode such as in the BIOS or on a simple terminal like what FreeNAS presents the user after booting. If it did work though, it would be easy enough to get one of these and use it for troubleshooting or modifying the BIOS settings if that's even possible in what looks to be a very locked down device.

Now lets just say that the DisplayLink device would work in a very simple mode and we could indeed access a BIOS to change boot order, lets assume that the board has a mini PCI-E expansion slot in it for kicks since quite a few Atom boards do (and Acer might have been too lazy to just exclude it's installation on what i assume is a custom board). We could put in a PCI-E SSD like this one and configure the BIOS to boot from that. But I have a feeling that's just wishful thinking and we'd be better off hoping that there would be an extra SATA port. You could also theoretically just use a thumbdrive assuming the BIOS would allow you to boot from a removable USB device. Again probably just wishful thinking.

If you've read back far enough here you'll remember I was in the process of building my own NAS for media storage and backup. I was recently reading through the RSS feed from engadget and came across the Acer easyStore. While this is a lot more polished in the end than my home-brew NAS box it ended up being a little more expensive as well. The parts I used are as follows:

• Jetway VIA CN700 Mini-ITX $99.99
• Corsair 1GB DDR2 533 $19.99
• Syba IDE-CF adapter $12.99
• A-DATA 2GB CF Card $8.49
• Athena Power 3x3.5" SATA Backplane $61.99
• Apex Mini-ITX Case + 250W PSU $55.99
• Promise SATA II Controller $59.99
• Western Digital Caviar SE16 640GB (QTY:3) $227.96 ($69.99 ea)

Ignoring extraneous things like shipping and sales tax the grand total is $547.39. If you take out the hard drives it was only $319. While the Acer Altos easyStore will be $400 (with one preinstalled 1TB drive). Granted Acer's looks much prettier than mine and depending on the internals it might even have hardware raid where mine doesn't. Though considering it's got Windows Home Server installed i'm doubting very much that it has hardware raid.

When I first started building my NAS box atom processors had only just started to come out let alone be available in mini-itx packages like the one I bought. I could just as easily upgrade the motherboard in mine for somewhere between $80 and $120 which might bring new life to my system, but for what it does now and it's general duties the Via C7 it's got is good enough for me.

I think if I ever decided to get one of the Acer Altos easyStore NAS's I'd just stick an IDE-CF adapter inside (assuming it's got PATA) and load freeNAS onto that and use all 4 bays for storage instead of OS + Storage on the 4th drive.