NASLite Network Attached Storage

I'm planning a new home NAS and was looking at Via Epia SN boards. Does anyone have any experience with these?

I wanted to use a Chenbro ES340 chassis with the 4x hot swap drive bays and note that there is no expansion card slot in the back panel. I appear to be able to use a riser card, from Via, for the PCIE slot, and, I assume (dangerous!!!http://www.serverelements.com/forums/posting.php?mode=post&f=22#), that I can buy a hardware raid card and remove the mounting bracket without affecting the card's functionality?

While looking at the SN boards, i noticed Via does NAS specific boards (a NAS7800 and a NAS7040). Both look "ideal" but I note they don't have monitor/keyboard connections. Obviously targeted at the OEM market for someone to build and sell a dedicated NAS.

Would it be possible to use one of the NAS board for NASLite-M2? Can Ii install the system onto a CF card through "another" computer and then transfer the CF card to this board?

Many thanks.

On RAID, you will need to be careful. NASLite-2 and M2 only support hardware RAID cards (as you already know from your mention of installing a hardware RAID card). Also, I do not know of any PCI-E hardware RAID cards that are supported (yet...).

Installing the operating system on the CF card in another machine is not a problem - I have done it several times successfully.

The fact that they do not have KVM is not much of an issue. The issue is that they are only available to OEMs for integration in to commercial products last I checked.

Mike

many thanks for the speedy replies.

i guess i'll have to change my thought process.