I have a modded Xbox with XBMC and a full HD. So, what I'm wanting to do is get some type of other hard drive and convert all of my DVDs onto it so XBMC can access all of my movies. Thing is, what should I buy considering price and durability? Should I get one of those $180 500GB external hard drives from some website and just have it hooked up to my laptop and share it on my network, or should I just go for a network storage device so everything on the network has access to the hard drive (so I don't have to grab the external drive while my laptop is on the couch or whatever). Also, my wireless router doesn't have a firewire or USB input on it, so I'm assuming I would have to buy a different router for an external hard drive or network storage device to hook straight up to the router, or can it go through an ethernet cord?

Can XBMC grab stuff off of a network storage device or NAS?

XBMC can most certainly pull things off of a NAS. There are a number of ways to set it up to use it. The most common is to simply share a drive off of the NAS via Samba and tell XBMC where to find it. I have all of my music and some movies stored on my NAS and XBMC handles them wonderfully.

You can plug a NAS straight into any available ethernet port on your home network. I'm not sure about hooking it directly to the ethernet port on the XBox... I wouldn't recommend trying that.

if you wanted to connect directly between the nas and the xbox over ethernet you'd just need a crossover cable and to set static ips on both of them.. but you'd lose the imdb lookups/etc that xbmc has.