External Harddrives/NAS and your HTPC?

[CreePinG_DeatH]

Are there any downsides to having either external harddrives or a NAS box hooked up to your HTPC for the purpose of storing the recordings? Granted, it's one extra box you need to place somewhere, and one extra cable to hide, but should the hard drives be inside your HTPC case?

[fabulouscoops]

I don't see anything wrong with it. An external drive would make the recordings portable so you could play them on another computer without burning to a DVD.

[Mr. Roboto]

It's reall matter of preferance. I don't see anything wrong with it either.

[Jon]

You'll want to be on a gigabit network if you're going to be moving around recordings as they can become quite large. You'll especially want to be on a gigabit if you're planning on doing playback on raw recorded files over the network.

Other than that, I use network storage for video playback on my bedroom HTPC. It's only on 100Mb, but I only do playback of avi files (roughly 1000Kbps) and it works fine.

[CreePinG_DeatH]

Should I have a small fast HDD with the OS inside the HTPC? Or can that be external too?

[Jon]

I would prefer my OS drive be internal. I suppose if your system can boot and operate from a USB drive, then you can go that route. Performance-wise, not a good idea.

[Mr. Roboto]

I would prefer my OS drive be internal. I suppose if your system can boot and operate from a USB drive, then you can go that route. Performance-wise, not a good idea.

Agreed.

[LandShark]

the only problem I could see using NAS box is network speed. if just for storage of recorded shows, yes, still fine as long as you are not trying to stream HD shows. (tried to stream HD shows using BTVLink on laptop from my HTPC as BTV server, wirelessG, no go of course! :p but standard SD shows still ok.) but IF you are going to record directly onto the network drive, then network speed and network traffic might be a concern.

also, external SATA box will act the same as a internal SATA drive, so it'll make no difference in this case.

and yeah, as Jon said, IF you going to move video files around often (like me), gigabyte network is AMUST!!