[geeks] Interesting "minimal" PC - network appliance box?

[Lionel Peterson]

   Tiger Direct is offering a shuttle KPC K4500-RS PC for about $220 with
   a Celeron 1.8 GHz CPU, 512 Meg RAM, 80 Gig SATA drive, Gigabit
   Ethernet and a single PCI port in a small box with a 100 Watt PS.[0]
   (Nicer pictures are available here[1])

   If you took that box, added a low-cost dual-port PCI 10/100 NIC[2] (to
   complement the on-board 10/100/1000 Marvel Ethernet port), you could
   make a nice router/firewall/gateway box - with an estimated 50-60W
   power usage.

   Toss the 80 Gig drive and instead add two 1 TB or even 1.5 TB SATA
   drives, and you've got a pretty functional FreeNAS/OpenFiler/etc box.

   So, for about $500 you could make up a small, 2 TB fileserver or for
   under $300 you could build a nice router/gateway box...

   Thought some here might be interested in the box - looks like a great
   way to make a low-end, low-power system with "standard" components,
   and with some room to grow (using faster/better CPU chips and adding
   cheap DDR2 RAM to expand the box to 2 Gigs when more horsepower is
   needed)...

   Lionel

   [0]
   http://www.compusa.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo
   =3980815&sku=S451-3170&srkey=S451-3170

   [1]
   http://www.nextdaypc.com/main/products/details.aspx?PID=4171387&rsmain
   id=ND0130014

   [2] http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160287463683