Thanks, Pyrroc. Actually, after the first article went up, a different person at Intel contacted me and sent that exact board and a Core 2 Duo E8500. So that will probably replace the ASUS board in the test bed.
Linux and freenas work just fine on my legacy machines. I would not touch whs with a ten foot pole. I downloaded the demo of it from Microsoft and I was really disappointed. Plus I do not want to have to load any client software to further encumber the client machines.
SSHFS Rules!