It quite noisy and the performance with Windows is not impressive at all. The response time is quite long for initial access, but after that things are working OK. But compared to a real file server it is slow. E.g. it is an annoyance that it can take a few seconds after selecting “open” in Excel until the NAS responds when the files open instantaneous when located on the local disk. Anyway it is cheap and (apparantly) can be hacked.
I run mirrored disks – at the moment I only have two disks mounted but will add another two 500GBs when the current space is filled up.
As for the noise it is dependent on load and I guess you can’t have a real quiet system if you also want to keep the temp down. I plan to shove it away in a closet somewhere out of my office and have bought some 10m Cat6 cables for that.
Please keep me (us) posted on you hacking experiences.