[pumkinut]

In my experience SMB is dog slow. No where close to the gigabit speeds I should be getting. Going to try NFS soon on my new oneiric box.

Whatever.

I have a Lucid box set up as a fileserver as well as full-blown NAS appliance and get upwards of 300-400Mbps throughput to each. This is with smb and FTP. BTW, FTP would be as fast, if not faster than NFS. And as has been pointed out, embed is more than fast enough for streaming video content.

At Gigabit speeds, your HDD is more likely to be thebottleneck, unless SSDs or some form of striped RAID is used. SSDs are not cheap on a per gigabyte basis, and RAIDed drives should always be backed up, because RAID is not backup.

[spelunk68]

Not too sure why you would want this either. NAS and HTPC have different purposes... it seems strange to me to combine the two and attach your NAS box (noisy with a bunch of spinning drives) to your TV.

Use the NAS to serve media and the HTPC to play media.

Hello,
I am looking for the same and thought I would comment. While an ideal set up is 2 dedicated boxes there are other issues at hand in my instance.I am involved in a small business and I am the technical portion of that business. I have over 20 sites I need to monitor for down status and other parameters. I have 8 computers running in my house and the power bill is getting out of hand. I have 4 dedicated machines sucking power that are on 24x7 XBMC (I could turn this off more but after I switch inputs but I forget, and also every once in a while I get a bug up my ass to search for some series I saw in a commercial and don't want to boot the KODI system just to check for it), monitoring server (Running the dude to monitor all of my remote Mikro Tik VPN sites and inter connected microwave backhauls), NAS server and a windows machine dedicated for special software and USB dongle that needs to run on windows to monitor usage and statistics of our interconnected two way radio trunked repeater system ( I am hoping I can run this on some sort of virtualization). Also x 3 monitors (I never got my networkable KVM set up oh well, either way I like to keep the monitoring server and two way trunked repeater server displays up 24x7 so I can see health of my network at a glance even with no alerts sent). Right now I am in the middle of building a new server which will be KODI, FreeNAS (I know, Samba why not, but I like the GUI) and my monitoring systems. This will cut the effective power usage in maybe half or more I hope, and free up valuable household real estate. Hopefully I will be able to configure the system to show the dude on one VGA monitor with the HDMI feeding the TV at the same time.

[vikjon0]

Not too sure why you would want this either. NAS and HTPC have different purposes... it seems strange to me to combine the two and attach your NAS box (noisy with a bunch of spinning drives) to your TV.

Use the NAS to serve media and the HTPC to play media.

Hello,
I am looking for the same and thought I would comment. While an ideal set up is 2 dedicated boxes there are other issues at hand in my instance.I am involved in a small business and I am the technical portion of that business. I have over 20 sites I need to monitor for down status and other parameters. I have 8 computers running in my house and the power bill is getting out of hand. I have 4 dedicated machines sucking power that are on 24x7 XBMC (I could turn this off more but after I switch inputs but I forget, and also every once in a while I get a bug up my ass to search for some series I saw in a commercial and don't want to boot the KODI system just to check for it), monitoring server (Running the dude to monitor all of my remote Mikro Tik VPN sites and inter connected microwave backhauls), NAS server and a windows machine dedicated for special software and USB dongle that needs to run on windows to monitor usage and statistics of our interconnected two way radio trunked repeater system ( I am hoping I can run this on some sort of virtualization). Also x 3 monitors (I never got my networkable KVM set up oh well, either way I like to keep the monitoring server and two way trunked repeater server displays up 24x7 so I can see health of my network at a glance even with no alerts sent). Right now I am in the middle of building a new server which will be KODI, FreeNAS (I know, Samba why not, but I like the GUI) and my monitoring systems. This will cut the effective power usage in maybe half or more I hope, and free up valuable household real estate. Hopefully I will be able to configure the system to show the dude on one VGA monitor with the HDMI feeding the TV at the same time.

That's fine but I doubt many people would see a high number of total machine as an argument to combine client and server functionality. It would make more sense to build a combined free NAS & ESX server and replace some of the kodi clients with andriod boxes. My FireTV resumes instantly btw.

With that said, my own basement media center is both the main media server and local kodi client. It is mostly a bad thing especially when upgrading or even rebooting.

PS There is a freeNAS alternativ which is debian based called open media vault http://www.openmediavault.org/

[blm14]

What you may want to do is just get a nice external 4-bay USB enclosure and attach it directly to your router running tomatoUSB: http://tomato.groov.pl/?page_id=164

This is what I did - just set up samba on my router and have 16 TB attached directly to the router that anything on the network can access the drives from there.