reecommendations for an 'appliance" platform ?

[Manolis Kiagias]

Pete French wrote:
>> 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.
>
>   
I own the X27D, in fact I am typing this from it.
It works reasonably well with FreeBSD (I am using  7.2/i386). The
ethernet card (100Mbit), USB , SATA, audio, Xorg all work fine. You will
only need this in sysctl.conf:

hw.acpi.thermal.polling_rate=0

otherwise you will be flooded with messages about weird temperatures.
There is a single 40mm fan in the chipset, and in my system it failed
about after a week of continuous operation. As it wasn't noisy it took a
couple of hours until I realized it. You may wish to replace it with a
better quality fan.
This will probably work ok with AMD64 too, though with 2G of RAM I had
no real reason to try.