Nice little box, quite expandable, great price
This is a good little home server box - it is quite expandable, and at this price, quite affordable. It comes with a single 500 Gig HD, and will accomodate up to 3 more SATA HDs internally, and has several USB and an eSATA port that accepts a port-multiplier, so you can attach a
four drive external SATA housing using only one cable.
It has 512 Meg of RAM, and while sufficient for WHS use, with some elbow grease and a few $10 bills you can
upgrade the RAM to a single 2 Gig PC2-5300 (667 MHz) DIMM giving the operating system more room to operate (and to support additional software roles, this is, after all a stripped down version of Windows Server 2003 with all the messy Active Directory components removed).
The CPU is rather low-spec, but perfectly fine for normal WHS use, but you can
upgrade to a faster AM2 (940 pin) Athlon CPU.
Details on each of these three "hacks" and more can be found at
Home Server Hacks.
At this price, the machine is about half-off the list price. The
OEM version of the OS this runs with is just about $100, so the OS plus brand-new hardware with a 1 year warranty for $200 more is a good deal, IMHO. (I bought one)
