looqs Meebox / “Novatech 500GB Home Storage NAS”
A few weekends ago I picked up the looqs Meebox from Novatech. I would link to the looqs site, but as of the time of writing it's currently unavailable because they've not renewed the domain (edit: this is now resolved).
TL;DR: The meebox is cheap because it's cheap. Runs an old Linux kernel, given time could probably get your own/other distros running, but I called it a day due to (lack of) hardware performance, the likelihood of not increasing its performance with custom “firmware”, and the fact that the vendor site wasn't available to dismantle a firmware update file at the time.