Since then my Atom box died (probably the power supply), so faced with the option of rebuying various components until I find one that broke I decided that I'd rather forgo that. Instead I got an $40 Seagate Goflex.
The atom box idled at 13W and maxed out around 20W, which was pretty impressive. Goflex can idle at 4W and maxes out at 7W. The 1ghz CPU is no x86 in speed, but it can keep up.
Clever people developed a fully-featured Uboot bootloader for it so it takes care of that typical non-x86 suck. I opted to run arch linux for arm since Debian support isn't particularly mature. In some ways Arch is better, it doesn't play games with proprietary firmware and stays up to date better.
So yeah with a $40 pricepoint, dual native sata, 4W idle even I will run ARM :)
Bonus: In theory I should be able to run the static binaries I compile on the goflex on my android phones.
