It's basically that I am building a collection of films/movies and watch more via a computer than I do via a DVD player nowadays. If I borrow a film and decide I like it, instead of copy it to a DVD, I tend to rip to image, then compress to AVI, and also I would say that 99.999999% of music playback is done via PC now, and I have thousands and thousands of songs in my MP3 collection. With the advantage of having a SFF desktop hooked into my AV set up downstairs, it means all music playback and movie watching is at fingertips all in one place, so my need for storage is growing!

I kinda hoped that by plugging the 320gb I had in my PC (as a second/slave drive) into my NAS server (which is also my wired + wifi router and internet/mail server) I could increase the total storage capcity from 400gb to 720gb, but it seems it won't let me do this. Only way round I can see it is to use a front end programme to display the content, allowing multiple datapath locations for the data - like how I use WMP for music - doesn't matter WHERE the files are stored, all music is accessed through WMP interface, not file folder explorer. So if I ran MediaPortal or MCE, I could access films from there all in one place, even tho the files are stored in different locations.

However, this SFF desktop isn't specced enough for that (1.8 P4, 128mb of RAM on a 5yr old office PC ) and the problem that the USB drive wouldn't do the same thing my NAS does - whilst the power is always on for my NAS, providing the ethernet router and internet server with constant power, the drive itself spins up and down depending on use - but the USB drive would permantly be on 24/7 - not good! So I'd have to unplug it, re-plug it, unplug it etc - pain in the ass when your watching something or listening to something and need to go upstairs and turn the USB drive on to continue!