VIA M’SERV: the Perfect Little Linux Box?

“Last year about this time we reviewed the VIA ARTiGO A2000 and
found it to be a great hardware complement to the FreeNAS
distribution. This time around we take a look at the latest
incarnation of the small server box from VIA named the M’Serv
S2100. We had to look pretty close to see the differences in the
two from the outside. On the front panel they’re virtually
identical with the exception of one LED. On the back panel the two
audio ports have been replaced with a second Ethernet port.

“Internally the two models look very similar. There is the easy
release front panel revealing two slide-in slots for SATA disk
drives. The CompactFlash slot is still there giving the same option
as before to build a FreeNAS server booting from an image on a
CompactFlash disk. New to this model is a second memory slot
supporting up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM. The processor also supports
hardware virtualization for running the latest Linux kernels with
KVM.

“Distro options

“Like the previous version, the M’Serv S2100 runs FreeNAS well.
We were able to move the SATA disks and CompactFlash, and it picked
back up right where it left off on the A2000 box. The extra memory,
additional Ethernet port and hardware virtualization support open
up a whole lot of new options for this box. The only issue we had
was the speed of the Ethernet ports which always came up at
100MB.”

Complete
Story