When will a cheap reliable plug better than Sheevaplug come out?

[nigelhealy]

I currently own just a Sheevaplug, its working fine. Thinking about ordering another plug, but what puts me off is the apparent lack of innovation in something reliable.
Seems the Sheevaplug is a viable product but it was released over 18 months ago. The successor products are just plain bad design, who needs something that hot, unreliable, noisy. At the costs they want or a Guruplug+ with a Jtag in case you mess the boot, its like a Netbook sort of cost.
What about say the Sheevaplug for $50?
Or a decent properly designed plug with new features.
Its getting a joke, really it is.
Rant over (for now).

[Gothnet]

I'm informed (from reading the forums) that ionics may have some units available if you email them direct and ask.

I'm interested in the Cirrus model that's got a 2GHz chip in it, but haven't a lot of cash to throw around right now and have other projects on.

[edmc]

How about a Seagate DockStar @ approx. $30?

[hanker]

How about a Seagate DockStar @ approx. $30?

Agreed. I have had one of these running Debian squeeze for about two months now. Great little box for the money. Makes for an excellent NAS and torrenting machine. I think they have been discontinued, so may want to hurry

[nigelhealy]

So I got a Dockstar, been my weekend project for 2 weekends, and I am well impressed, for the $27 delivered, it has all the CPU power I need. Its a tad short of memory, for example I'm hitting it hard now and its showing 62MB of swap used.
I've loaded it up with being my router and running QoS via iptables and tc and doing torrents, and being a NAS, and the torrents is causing the CPU spikes. So I've ordered a 2nd Dockstar and separate torrents from the rest.  That's partly due to memory, I'll then effectively double the memory via two units.
The Sheevaplug I got, I now think it would have been better being a Dockstar, its only doing proxy serving, its 512MB is showing 230MB free.

Guruplug? Forget it. Get 3 Dockstars and spread the load out. You then got some redundancy.

To me, having an external PSU and 3 USB ports is useful, means I don't have to worry about the heat inside the server from the PSU and  I can power boot device and storage and USB-Ethernet.

Now about 6 months after I stumbled on Plug Computers, I realize the manufacturers are thinking all wrong. Technically, the idea of Plug Computer is appealing, but they should separate the electrical power from the rest, and then focus on the capability of the server. The Sheevaplug with 512MB memory is probably a good level, but with external PSU. So the Dockstar concept, with more memory. I also think the Sheevaplug concept of USB serial is a good idea. The Dockstar hack of opening the case, or the Guruplug concept of external JTAG, is just adding more complexity.

So for me... now having used 2 Plugs (Sheevaplug, Dockstar), I'd say the right way forward is a unit which is a Plug with DC input, inbuilt console via USB, 512MB memory, SD slots, 3 USB slots, Gigabit Ethernet x2, 100Mbit x1

[kayla01]

How about a Seagate DockStar @ approx. $30?

I'm using this as well and so far, it does great .

[UnaClocker]

How much ram does the Dockstar have?

[varkey]

^ 128 MB

[UnaClocker]

Hmm, that'd probably work pretty well for me then, I've never used more than 101mb on my Sheeva, and I think that was when I was remotely running Firefox on it or something. Usually it's down near 62mb..
If you think our hardware is bad, google the "Hawkboard".. They can't even get that thing to boot, the engineers screwed up the hardware so badly.