[dchabby]

So I am looking to put together a media server to serve up my movies/tv/music to all the various XBMC/Kodi boxes I have in my place.

Right now I just have a couple of hard drives in my desktop that I use to hold everything but have ran out of space, both in the desktop and on the current drives.

So I was thinking of purchasing one of these 4 bay hard drive enclosures - http://www.mediasonic.ca/product.php?id=1357290977 - instead of a NAS as I don't need any transcoding done or any of the other fancy features of a full fledged NAS.

Would this work good as a server if I hooked it up to something like a raspberry pi ? Or would it be better to just hook it up to my desktop ? Maybe even hook it up to my Chromebox running openelec ?

Or is there a cheap build out there that I could put together for similar money ?

Edit - I also have an i3 3217-U NUC and I just read a post from nickr regarding mythbuntu. Would using the drive enclosure with a NUC running mythbuntu work good as a server ?

I do currently use my desktop to record live TV from m y HD Homerun so I could transfer that to my nuc as well

[shabuboy]

If you just need something to serve the files, there are some simple and very affordable NAS enclosures if you do not need transcoding or any fancy features. That would be my recommendation. After some DIY NAS devices and Dlink enclosures, I now have WD My Book Live. My NAS is the backup device for a HTPC, 3 laptops, 2 phones, it is my DNLA/SSH server, torrent client and it serves the media files to my HTPC/XBMC/phones/tablets/etc.

But yes, a USB enclosure will work attached to: Rasberry Pi, desktop or Chromebox.
It will all come down to how many clients are accessing the clients at the same time. Rasberry being the weakest device.With Chromebox you might be limited to share the files via the XBMC interface.

NAS devices are not usually a lot more powerful than desktops. However, they only have one purpose, to serve files to clients.
Most NAS as well, are just a Linux server strip down version.