If you are upto installing your own software I'd recommend that you take a look at the HP ProLiant N36 Microserver and use this as a NAS. There's a £100 cash back deal from HP in the UK at the moment meaning you can pick one up for around £135. It's got foUr HDD bays (further expandable with some tweaking) and comes with a 250Gb HDD to get you started. It's got an AMD 1.33Mhz 64 bit processor and 1 Gb RAM (expandable to 8Gb if you really need to).
I've installed FreeNAS and SlimNAS (on USB), an old CD ROM and 2 x 2tb HDD's. For a total spend of £255 it's been great. Over my network the responsiveness (e.g. changing track) is pretty much instant with a wired Duet. Pros of running a NAS? Main ones for me: 1. Lower running costs (unless you power a PC on/off or WOL - granted) 2. Gives all users in your home access to documents (or denies certain docs)24/7. 3. Expandability - with multi bay NAS's you can add additional storage as and when required. I also have many Tb's of stored films that we stream to a media player from the NAS (many of which are 40GB HD BluRay rips). 4. Local SBS works much better than MySBS and as my wife listens to radio on her SB Radio throughout the day the SBS on the NAS is more reliable (without having to turn a PC on). -- HeadBanger ------------------------------------------------------------------------ HeadBanger's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=38024 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=88501
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