Hardware hacks (drop sparc for ...) on NV+

I entirely understand that this is going well outside the envelope, reduces Netgear future sales (because I don't buy a new unit :-) and voids my warranty.

I have an NV+. Its ok, but its slow, and being SPARC its never going anywhere interesting, because code development on the SPARC variant is basically frozen everywhere.

But that said.. I am interested what people think about retaining the PSU (or a replacement: I see the NV+ fails) the caddys, the SATA cabling and the fan/chassis but replacing the innards/logicboard with something else.

I have seen that Allwinner dual-ARM cpu are now popping up in Raspberry-Pi format, with a SATA riser on the motherboard. These cards (sourced from China) are ~$150 and would provide a dual core Ghz CPU configuration with 2GB+ of memory, and would run Android, Debian/Linux, Free/Net BSD. This opens the prospect of moving to the less formal RAID mechanisms in the public NAS space, or ZFS.

I like my NV+ and I have absolutely no intention of disrespecting Netgear, I think the unit was an amazing pricepoint at end-of-life, although I do now wish I'd bought the ATOM based one, but bearing all that respect in mind.. is this even remotely plausible?

I haven't done a teardown to see if there is room to do this kind of re-engineering. I suspect none of the current LCD, ether or other components would be retained easily although "anything is possible"

Another possible exit strategy is to use the box as a 4Disk swappable chassis, with power, but cable the SATA out through a hole to "something else" -eg an Atom or ARM based unit with external sata access or eSATA or whatever. Again, I don't entirely understand if the physicals of the removable drive chassis inside the box would permit this: if it was built using some of the commodity h/w I saw on the market, then its just SATA, there is nothing special about the disks themselves or on the back of the caddies, and they might cable up to a single bus point anyway.

-George