Network Attached Storage

[igeekus]

Hey Folks, I'm looking to build an expandable NAS and would love some suggestions.

Should I look at an inexpensive barebones system with gigabit ethernet and tons of usb ports? (i.e. acer aspire revo)

Or should I go with something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108032
4 bay NAS, gigabit ethernet, 4 bays to start out with, 2xusb2.0, 1xesata (i'm kind of leaning towards this solution).

But when I decide I want to expand, would an external chassis with usb2.0 interface work for streaming hd video over a gigabit network (I'll have everything hard wired)? I know esata is faster, but I'm curious where the bottleneck might be.

FYI, I'd be looking at this to expand:
usb 2.0:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111047
esata:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111048

The plan is for this to be a nas and nothing else. Software running would probably be freeNAS, or some linux varient and most likely software RAIDing.

I don't mind spending a bit of money to get a decent system, but I also want to get the best bang for my buck.

Suggestions? Thanks in advance!

[redwudz]

In theory, USB 2.0 could keep up, though not sure if it could with MKV or Blu-ray formats. What I did is just use a couple of full tower cases with cheap Micro-ATX MBs and CPUs and loaded them with HDDs. I use a gigabit LAN to access and turn on the servers remotely. The servers use whatever OS I had available, mostly XP, as the OS doesn't do much of anything with my setup anyway, just run the drives. I also used my router configuration to block those servers from internet access over the LAN to avoid problems. I have about 6TB of storage on the servers at present.

The playback may be fine with USB 2.0, but transferring the files initially to the USB drives may be slow. My drives are SATA and PATA and data transfers up to 85MB/s to the servers over the LAN.

EDIT: I wouldn't bother with RAID unless you need data redundancy. Speed isn't much of a issue. Redundancy like RAID 1 or higher will take a lot of drives, though.