The concept is great, have a weenie little device with say a 750GB hard drive in it and you have a terrific always on server for your home. Well, the problem is that most of the home devices are incredibly slow. Here are the ones I looked at, the Nexstar LX seems nice because it doesn't include a drive, so you can add your own. It is also only $65 for the enclosure. Toms Networking has a big list of other devices as well and he really likes the Synology DS-106e
Nexstar LX. This is nearly the ideal device. I already use the Nexstar 3 SATA enclosure for backup and it fits a 750GB hard drive very nicely. The main issue with this one is that the performance is very, very slow over Ethernet Otherwise, it is nearly ideal, the NST 375LX supports up to 500GB IDE drives and has a smart cooling fan plus it is an FTP and an SMB file server with a Web interface from Vantec
The problem is that a USB 2.0 interface runs at 480Mbps and you get a real 25MBps or so out of a USB 2.0 drive in the read, but Ethernet 100Mbps is way slower and the protocol is much more wasteful so you normally get 3MBps or 10x slower than USB. In the real world a 5GB copy took 13 minutes with USB 2.0 and 23 minutes with Ethernet NAS but that's more a limitation of the protocol. It would be interesting to see how a Gigabit Ethernet interface would fare.
BTW, Sysopt.com found the same basic performance with a direct ATA133 IDE drive running at 39MBps so that's the real world maximum of a NAS drive, the Nexstar GX dedicated USB 2.0 enclosure running at 31MBps, the Nexstar LX over USB 2.0 at 26MBps while the Nexstar LX over Ethernet was just 2.7MBps.
One final point from virtual hideout is that this drive needs to use FAT32 to function, it doesn't support NTFS, so on a 500GB drive, you are certainly going to get big blocks and less efficient storage.
