[Davesworld]

If an IDE drive keeps it from booting, I would guess that it overrides the bootable flash image. If this is true, one could install FreeNAS on a drive and see if it will allow the snap to boot up off of it. Too bad there isn't at least a serial port on these. It definitely is NOT scsi since that would be a 50 pin or 68 pin connector and a scsi controller chip would would be obvious on the mobo as are the promise controllers. It's probably a direct connection to the piix controller which likely also runs the Intel flash chip where SnapOS resides. BTW, I dl'ed the FreeNAS VMWare player image and set it up. The update notification page is sweet. I've already updated it twice from the gui after I installed it from the slightly older VMWare image. At version 0.65, it's already way ahead of SnapOS. The development cycle seems to be moving fast and there is no hardware on a snapserver that FreeNAS won't drive. It only uses about 16MB once installed so it will definitely fit on the flash image. Now, if only there was an easy way to get it to replace SnapOS. Sure, it's easier just to get a newer platform but why not get some new life out of these devices? They are plenty powerful enough to run large capacity raid volumes for just a small network. Newer drives may actually have less load on the cpu since IDE devices have become more cpu friendly with time, not less.