reecommendations for an 'appliance" platform ?

[Pete French]

> I've tried the Atom330 (D945GCLF2). It works fine with amd64...however 
> it's rather wasted for 64bit considering it maxes out at 2gb. But I 
> suppose if you wanted to standardize on amd64 installs, this is good.

Size of memory doesnt bother me really - I made the move to amd64 because
of the extra performance due to the extra registers (about 8% on my
application, I realise that not everyone gets a speedup). Given the
fact I am also moving to ZFS, and that works a lot better on amd64, then
I am not keen to go back ;-)

> Gigabit - ok, re0. You'll need 7.2 at least.
> USB - ok
> SATA - 2 ports tested only with gmirror, ok.

Those three are very good to know work - the box will be headless, so I
just need ether and booting to work fine. Am always wary of re0 ethernets
as have been bitten in the past.

Thanks for all the advice from eeryone in this thread - I have narrowed
the choice down to either the Tranquil PC unit, or the Shuttle X27D,
which is also Atom 330 based. Given the price I may simply buy one of each
and evaluate which is better. Will report back if so.

cheers,

-pete.