One of my nerdy friends asked me yesterday 'which NAS (networked attached storage) box to buy?'

It occurred to me, after my recent 'interesting' experiment running an Atom D2550 on WCG that, as many NAS boxes run Atoms, we should be able to make a NAS box, that while not serving, could be crunching. At home, my own Iomega NAS tends to run 24/7, waiting for that one hour on a Friday night when I decide to watch a movie from it. Occasionally it streams MP3's - hardly hard work. (I know that NAS usage can be more intensive for many.)

So, my own Atom-box – a Mini-Itx case and Atom D2550 mobo with a 250 Gb drive in it has become a WCG NAS box, by running Ubuntu, BOINC and Samba. It's headless, runs XRDP for access from Windows RDP.

I'm currently fine tuning task priorities. The box takes 30 watts from the wall when crunching 4 WU's, and running SAMBA in the background. So far it seems up to the task of streaming MP3's while crunching 4 work units. Samba may be eating some WCG cycles, but I don't think it'stoo many.

The 1Tb Iomega box pulls only 9 watts from the wall, by the way.

Any more WCG NAS box tips?