Picked one up off eBay for $100, fooling around with it. I bought 4 14tb WD external drives at Best Buy for $200 each and shucked them. Problem with my 400D is that it refuses to post with all 4 drive slots occupied with the drives, just 2, it gets stuck in an eternal loop- turns on, the off then on, etc. I can insert the 2 drives after I boot into Unraid, but it’s a pain. Probably a BIOS issue.
Put 8GB of ddr3 in there and a 2tb nvme in the PCIe slot. Unraid works, with a few issues I’m trying to sort out,
in the end this seems just like a temporary stop-gap until I decide to upgrade to something better. It’s kind of slow, but just as a media server for an in home network to watch movies off of (not Plex, this thing isn’t fast enough to transcode anyways) it’s fine.
I speed tested the nvme drive in it, the reads are maxing out at like 180MBps, lol. Limitation of its crappy PCIe bus I think. Fast enough for a cache.
I wonder if I could replace the embedded motherboard in it with something more recent/powerful? The value in this is the case/power supply. It would have to have a PCIe slot that lines up with the drive bay’s controllers.
I can’t figure out if the current board that’s in there is a custom one of not.