Originally Posted by ciac 
I am in the market for a small cheap NAS too, and the impending release of N299 in the States made me wait.
I agree and find it wholly unacceptable for a dual bay NAS like N299 to NOT support drive spindown. I suspect it should just be a firmware issue? It's the main reason why I stayed away from likes of Buffalo Linkstation Pro and the highly hackable NSLU2 (the SLUG). It just makes no sense for its target segment of home/SOHO users.
I agree that spindown is very important and it's extraordinary how many NAS devices don't do it.
It is possible to get the NSLU2 (the SLUG) to spin down an attached USB hard drive, if you run Debian.
I've created a setup like this to do regular snapshot backups with rsync.
The NSLU2 runs full Debian Etch from a 2GB USB stick (in fact 1 GB would have been enough). The /boot, / and swap partitions are all on the USB stick.
The backups are on a hard drive in an Icybox enclosure connected to the NSLU2 through a USB port and this hard drive spends 99% of its life asleep. The whole setup is completely silent except when the crontab runs the rsync job, when the hard drive wakes up for a few seconds and then spins down again when the job is finished.
The spindown commands (part of the backup script) are:
umount /dev/sda1 || error "could not unmount backup device"
sg_start --pc=2 0 /dev/sda1
I can provide more detail on this, but it should probably go in a separate thread somewhere.
The NSLU2 running Debian is a brilliant device. I've bought a couple of spares for future projects.
John