Well, here's my $.02.

You don't need very much processor power. If all you're using it for is to store music, you don't need much I/O throughput either! Even when you put your music on the server, the bottleneck is likely the encryption anyhow. So, forget about trying to make a high performance file server. It's just not necessary and you'll pay a premium for it.

I bought 3 320GB Western Digital drives from newegg for $135 each (after rebate). I use an old Pentium III machine and just put the latest Debian (on this group's recommendation), software RAID5 and Samba. I have 583GB of storage that I can drag&drop from Windoze. Its a big ugly machine, but it sits in a closet on a UPS and I never see it.

This whole thing took about an hour and a half to get going. I think that anybody who can use an empeg can get this going with an old computer they or someone they know have laying around. I just can't see spending the extra money on a prebuilt system like these NAS systems. I guess a Shuttle machine would look better, but who cares? Besides, cramming 3 disks in a small case will shorten their life because they will be right next to each other and run hotter.

My GF and I both use this thing all the time. We play files in Windows using Winamp at the same time. I've simultaneously uploaded new music to the server, synchronized my empeg, and had 2 computers playing music in Winamp (via Samba) and it has never lagged out. This is a measly P3-550Mhz.

I'm guessing that you have an old machine laying around that will do the trick. Stick it in a closet with an ethernet cable and forget about it. Before upgrading, I had 2 250GB drives in a software RAID0 configuration. I wanted the redundancy of RAID5 so I upgraded. The machine had run for over 400 days without a reboot or any attention whatsoever. The only reason it wasn't 600+ days is that I moved and needed to shut it off.

Spend the money you save on another disk, or on 100GB drives for your empeg!

FWIW,

Jim