CryptoNAS Live-CD Hardware Compatibility

This page lists known hardware compatibilities and incompatibilities with the CryptoNAS "Debian Live" system.

"I want to buy new hardware for use as a CryptoNAS appliance; what kind should I buy?"

Depending on your budget and requirements, a tiny fanless PC can be a better solution for a CryptoNAS appliance than a larger desktop PC:

* highly competitive in price with cheap PCs
* take up less space
* use very little power
* almost completely silent

A good discussion of some of these systems is located at http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT2016997232.html . Note that CryptoNAS presently runs on only some of the architectures presented there: i386 is known to work; PowerPC should work but hasn't been tried yet. The VIA- and AMD Geode- based systems are particularly attractive because they have native cryptographic acceleration with good Linux support.

ICOP eBox : mostly works

One of the developers has a pre-release version of CryptoNAS Live-CD 0.4 running off of CompactFlash? on an eBox-3853 at 800 MHz. If using this system as a CryptoNAS appliance, a CompactFlash? card or internal IDE device is strongly recommended, as the BIOS tends to forget which is the startup disk when booting from USB. Some USB devices also seem not to work well with the eBox. In this case, a "restore default BIOS settings" operation is required after removing the offending USB device.

* CIFS read:7 MBps/write: 8 MBps (i.e. MegaBYTES per second) over Ethernet with ~85 percent CPU utilization
* http://www.compactpc.com.tw/
* http://www.icoptech.com/
* Users in the USA can buy directly from http://wdlsystems.com/ebox/ebox.shtml .