Yea the NAS option is the best alternative I think (Although you cannot play Games off of it of course), right now I have my xbox with a 750GB and I swap various HD's depending on what I want to watch... I used to have the Xtender II setup, but twice it shorted my motherboard and ruined my xbox so I gave up on that... but i've been meaning to get a NAS setup for a long time, just haven't had the time!
Some benefits of using a NAS are:
*
Portability: It's practically an external Hard Drive, so the portability part is awesome (instead of wiring to computer/laptop, etc)... You can just bring your NAS to a friends house who has xbmc, and hook up your NAS to his xbox and access your entire collection...without ever needing to bring your xbox or additional HDD's
*
Size (GB): You can use any size HDD you want...You can get NAS's that support 1,2,3, or 4+ Hard Drives, SATA & PATA well over 3TB.
*
Wireless Support: There are some that support wireless, so if you have the wireless adapter for your xbox, you can leave your NAS in whatever room whiel your xbox access's it, or other xbox's
*
Xbox AND PC: We all know you can't hook up an xbox HDD to a PC and play the files, with a NAS you can just hook it up to each one, together or seperatly!
*
Longer filenames: I'm not positive on this one, but im pretty sure you won't be stuck with the limitations of FATX (I think!), so you can have the longer filenames and the other benefits... I could be wrong on this one though
I'm sure there are other great reasons for NAS, probably some bad things too... but to me the above is why I will be setting up a NAS soon
EDIT: Here are some links for some NAS's Ive been looking into:
D-Link: http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=0&pid=509
This looks sexy, supports 2 HDD's (SATA)
NetGear: http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/Ne...rage/SC101.aspx
This looks good, supports 2 HDD's (PATA), its also cheap : ($80 at outpost.com)
D-Link: http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=0&pid=377
This looks alright, supports 1 HDD, has 2 USB ports (Plug in 2 additional external HDDs), and also wireless!
So there are many options, these are my top 3 choices, either something sexy, cheap, or wireless... hard choice!As far as divx, its up to you really, if you want your 360 accessing it too or not... me personally, I will always use divx cause everything I have is divx and would be frustrating converting everything everytime i get a video... Thats just me though, hopefully 360/PS3 will support divx soon, but i doubt it!
This post has been edited by NineT9mustang: Feb 24 2007, 08:43 PM