Hey Jared,
Just so you've got some context, I've got the N40L
model, running with 8GB RAM and 4x 2TB drives. 2 of the drives
are running btrfs as root (/), and the other two are /backup.
Everything else is stock, no custom RAID cards, etc.
*
how loud are they in real world applications?
It's got a massive fan at the back, but it's
at the ambient fan noise level you easily ignore. The
drives are louder when they are doing lots of writes. In
fact, my laptop when it's running super hot is louder than
it. So I personally don't notice the noise coming from it.
*
what sort of network throughput do you see?
I can't really comment on this one. I've never
noticed it to be an issue for anything I've used it for,
and I did have it as a VPN end point for my work at one
point so it saw a lot of data throughput without any
issues. Also, I usually have 2 VMs running in Virtual Box
on it and all three machines (host + 2x VMs) seem to be
quite responsive for my needs network-wise.
*
any surprises in the hardware running Ubuntu?
I've only tried 12.04 LTS, but it runs
flawlessly. Everything I've tried works without any
problems.
If
anyone has any insight I'd be interested, I'm looking for a
good balance between power consumption and enough power to
run a couple of other things that a basic NAS can't do.
Mine is typically running 12.04 with a minimal
LAMP server, backup server, general purpose SSH box, and
VirtualBox. There are usually two VMs running: my work
application dev server, which is heavily resource intensive
(HDD, CPU, and RAM), and a build server running Jenkins and
GitLab. I've had as many as 10 VMs running at once on it, but
it gets slow under a lot of load - which is to be expected
from only a 1.5 ghz dual core. I think it's a fantastic little
server, and worth it, especially for the price if you're after
a good little all-rounder. It's even got an internal USB stick
if you want to boot from a minimal USB (i.e. ESXi).
If you need more RAM, you can put some 8GB sticks
in to get it up to 16, but I haven't experimented as some
chips don't work. If you need more CPU, get the N54L which is
more expensive but has a 2.2ghz dual core. But if you need
something for really CPU-heavy work, you might want something
else.
Hope that helps, and isn't too much information.
Thanks,
~Stephen
