Like many geeks I've got a considerable amount of storage at home - currently, that's around 7TB split between various storage systems and it doesn't include space provided by Hard Drives in various bits of hardware I have scattered around the study.

After HP introduced their offer I decided to get one simply to throw 4 x1TB Hard drives I had floating around into it just to provide additional storage and I thought that booting from a 16GB USB stick would be perfect for this job.

It wasn't. I've found that openfiler is a bit cumbersome to get to grips with, the menus don't link from one section to another. So, for example, if you want to create a Windows share it's not obvious where you go - there is nothing for Windows or CIFS on the main menu and once you find it you'll often find that there is a pre-requisitie you need to configure first and thats on a different menu so you have to start again!

None of this would be a major issues except for one thing.

It's slow. Really, really painfully, awfully slow.

I know that the Microserver ships with just 1GB of RAM and that an openfiler system really needs 2GB minimum but menus should not take 5 minutes+ to respond to a click and I notice that other people have been complaining about the same issues.

So, for me Openfiler works, is clunky and slow. I'm going to replace it this weekend with .
FreeNAS