I have a 500 MHz unit, 512M ram, which I think is the 5501-70, new in early 2011, updated to the latest bios mid spring (bios was old on arrival from the factory).
I installed a vpn1411 and a new-old-stock 40G 2.5" PATA disk. My experience has been with NetBSD 5.[01]_STABLE, really tip of netbsd-5 branch since about February. It's been mostly good, with two issues - one that is pretty clearly due to NetBSD issues, and one about which I'm not sure. * huge disk not stable with rump mount or WAPBL I have 2T disk on the USB port (no hub). With a regular (traditional kernel) mount (of a GPT partition), without WAPBL, it has been completely solid - up for probably 6 months solid except for a 24h power failure recently. With a rump mount, the system crashes after a while, I think due to leaks and issues with multithreaded processes abending, and with WAPBL I think the 0.5G of ram is overstressed by the 2T drive during steady large writes (it's a backup drive, basically). This is 99.999% clearly not a hardware issue. * crypto accelerators With opencrypto drivers for the vpn1411 or for the geode security coprocessor, I got some kind of lockups/crash with heavy ssh. I am guessing this is a driver bug, but I really don't know. I am virtually certain this is not a power supply issue as the board is wired to about 30 Ah (original, tired, maybe 15 Ah now) total of lead-acid batteries ganged together, with a 6A-capable float charger. Even spikes to 10A wouldn't faze this setup, relative to the 5V regulator. Unfortunately NetBSD-5's envstat(8) reports no drivers, so I don't know the CPU temperature. My notes-to-self while figuring this out are at: http://www.lexort.com/blog/net5501.html (The disk stability issue was only half figured out last I updated the page. But my machine with kernel mount, no wapbl, no accelerators is completely stable.)
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