I'm actually partial to Asus Netbooks. I have had a 700, 900 and 1000 series. I still have to two later ones. The reason for the "whole" netbook is that it has it's own UPS, you don't have to drag out a monitor if something goes tits up, and it's designed to run off of USB pretty much completely from boot to finish. 

They are quiet, and pretty unobtrusive. The only thing you need to make sure about is that you place any netbook on a hard surface without any clothe, so it can breathe and won't overheat. It's pretty much par for the course with any laptop anyway. 

I looked through some of the posts about FreeNAS. Personally I would never touch the OS again if someone paid me. I had 3x where for whatever reason after having it for the most part configured and doing some final stuff in the Web interface that the whole OS locked up. This was only the beginning of troubles. When I finally could regain control of the machine the OS, or the filesystem itself and/or all my data was destroyed. Needless to say I wasn't happy. I converted it back over to a Linux box and had no issues.

vp