Has anyone used a NAS for keeping movies/music?

[LaTropa64]

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82e16822155306

i'm thinking very seriously about purchasing that. it says it supports smb, so i'm guessing it would work with xbmc but a lot of the reviews are complaining about speed issues when it's running with redundancy on.

i rip all my cd's to the smb share via xbmc and i also rip full dvd's via dvd2xbox to the smb share. it works now without a problem and i can stream the full dvd's back to the xbox and they play great. i'm using a pentium 4 though and it only has a single drive on it so no raid 5.

[HarshReality]

built my own 1t nas (4 250wd drives) not in a raid array mind you but hey... it does the job streaming over wireless (1 modified g router on the xbox acting as an ap) and it works wonderfully.

[LaTropa64]

i've got an old mobo with an amd1700 just sitting around that i could hook some ide's to and get some decent space out of but i figure if i'm going to go to the trouble of ripping all 200 of my dvd's i might as well have some redundancy.

but by the time i bought a nice raid card and a decent server case i would still be lacking harddrives and already spent as much money as that 1tb buffalo nas costs.

[the_titans]

yes, this model works with your xbox via samba.

[robc]

nas is what i use. thats really the way to go. then you dont even need a computer running all the time for your shares. i have 300 gig maxtor. works great!

[LaTropa64]

i just wonder how well it can keep up with streaming a full dvd movie. especially when doing raid 5.

[robc]

or you could skip the raid all together and wait for the 300gig hologram dvds to come out. use those for the backups.

im no expert on streaming video but streaming a full quality dvd over the network seems like a bit much. i think you're going to have to rip the dvd to some file format other than vob files anyways. i would think the only thing that would happen really is the larger the file, the longer it would take to buffer and start.

i would say rip one to a share and test it out. id be interested in hearing how this works with different compression settings, should you chose to play around with it.

[hazeh]

have you actually tried streaming a dvd off a network share? works perfectly, it's ideal for me now there's dvd menu support.

different compression settings? i wouldn't even consider doing anything but a direct rip. startup on a wired network is pretty much instant, at least as quick as having a dvd in the drive.

300gig hologram dvds sounds good. i'm only good at following hardware when i'm looking at buying, but i havn't seen much about this. obviously hd dvd and blueray is on its way, so these are coming out afterwards? think you're looking a little too far forward hehe - software raid with a few cheap drives, even pretty decent hardware cards are available for hardly any outlay.

[LaTropa64]

yeah, streaming full dvd's works perfect for me too. i've never had any buffer issues. when i get a new dvd i want to backup for future play on the xbox and i'm feeling too lazy to walk into the computer i just pop it in the xbox and start-up dvd2xbox and it lets you rip dvd's right to your samba share.

as far as waiting on technology, i've decided if i did that i would never really do anything. sure my dvd collection will be obsolete in a couple years when hd-dvd is the norm but i might as well enjoy things for now.

[Loto_Bak]

for users having problems with their nas devices i helped a fella where referencing the ip would not work but using the 'computername' would.

on a pc when he tried to browse \\192.168.2.200 it would forward him to a webpage that allowed him to update the firmware via a form.
this could possibly be why xbmc has issues with some nas devices