Hi all. I am trying to decide which route to go for storing all my movies and audio for streaming playback to an xbox with XBMC.

Options are:

1) 1TB NAS drive limited to 10/100 ethernet since the xbox can only go that high.
2) 1TB external drive with USB2.0 direct to PC and then to 10/100 ethernet.
3) 1TB external drive with Firewire 800 direct to PC and then 10/100 ethernet.

For this point of view it would seem that all three options would be bottlenecked by my 10/100 ethernet connection. Hence the cheapest price wise would be best. Does this make sense or am I missing something?

Lastly - I assume that streaming DVD quality avi files across a 10/100 ethernet connection would not be a problem and that there is sufficient bandwidth in the network connection right? What about High Def recording? Will 10/100 be enough for that, assuming I upgrade my media box to something that supports HD down the road? Thank you all.

Gregg

You say 10/100, but which is it? 10Mb is not enough for high-def, 100Mb is fine assuming there is no other traffic.

If you direct connect the drive to your PC, your PC has to be on. That should be the only differentiator.


Bill

Any option would work. Make sure your network is running at 100 rather than 10 (it should be) and you are gold. All of them are fast enough providing the PC is not dirt slow. And as I said in another thread I have an old Celeron 1400 machine running XP with 256mb of ram that can stream DVD ISO files perfectly while encoding another file to Xvid with AutoGK (and yeah, I have more capable machines too but it illustrates the point). Meaning, it's rather easy with today's devices. Don't overthink it as many people get caught up in all the big fun builds people do (I myself am planning one but not for any performance reason at all).

Thanks all.