MSI Wind Nettop PC Barebones NAS with Ubuntu Server

We've been running a MSI Wind Nettop dual core Atom based system as a NAS for a couple of months now. I thought I'd share some of the information about this sort of home-built NAS. The basic system works great as a file sharing device with lots of power and flexibility.

We've installed various operating systems on the hardware, but are now using Ubuntu Linux Server - version 8.04.2 along with Webmin as a frontend so that we can run the NAS headless (no monitor, keyboard or mouse permanantly attached.The specific system we bought was a barebones system to which we added 2 GB of RAM (very cheap these days - less than $25) and a 1 TB Hitachi hard drive.

We partitioned the drive into a 10 GB Linux Ubuntu system drive with a 5 GB swap partition and the rest formatted into an XFS partition for data.

Below is a table showing results of testing the MSI Wind Nettop system using Intel's NAS Toolkit software:

Testname               Run1  Run2  Run3  Run4  Run5    Median
HD Video Playback      40.0  38.2  40.1  39.9  39.1     39.9MB/s
2x HD Playback         28.9  22.5  26.4  29.1  28.7     28.7MB/s
4x HD Playback         26.1  27.6  23.1  25.7  26.8     26.1MB/s
HD Video Record        55.4  45.9  55.8  55.5  55.5     55.5MB/s
HD Playback and Record 37.4  41.1  33.7  37.7  40.1     37.7MB/s
Content Creation       10.3   9.0   9.1  10.2   9.8      9.8MB/s
Office Productivity    34.0  34.6  33.7  34.4  32.3     34.0MB/s
File copy to NAS       47.3  46.6  47.3  47.5  47.1     47.3MB/s
File copy from NAS     40.3  39.4  38.5  40.4  39.6     39.6MB/s
Dir copy to NAS        12.6  12.2  12.2  13.0  12.1     12.2MB/s
Dir copy from NAS      12.5  12.8  12.6  12.5  13.1     12.6MB/s
Photo Album            13.8  13.4  14.3  13.6  14.1     13.8MB/s

Using the batch mode in the NAS test software, each test is run 5 times - the median results are in the last column above.

These results are compared to some other NAS devices on the NAS speed comparison test page.

All in all, a pretty snappy system - and it has been running very stable with no reboots or problems since we last installed the OS - over 30 days as of today.

Not counting the hard drive, the whole system cost less than $200 - quite a fast and powerful (any Ubuntu software can be loaded and run) NAS. By the way, we measured power usage with a Kill a Watt meter - it showed around 31 Watts with the hard drive spinning - so the system is pretty "green" also.

Checkout the MSI Wind Nettop Barebones at Amazon.Com: MSI Wind Nettop 100 Desktop PC (1.6 GHz Intel Atom Dual Core N330 Processor, Barebone) Black