I have a Lian Li harddrive rack, made for inside a case, but can hold 4 drives. I’ll find some pics if your interested.
Some of you mofo’s are better off with server’s 
Yeah I still say go with a NAS. This one is small, but looks sick and the functionality seems awesome. Someone else (forget who) posted it in Archie’s NAS thread:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4468017&CatId=2671
The only thing I dont know about is how well you will be able to stream the data over a network, with the GIANT blueray files and all.
Gig ehternet is max 1Gbps.
Sata is 3.0-6.0gbps
Thats wired. you mentioned your wireless, which is at most 160 Mbps 802.11N. so you would have to wire it to gig or your almost 25 times slower than local sata would yield.
I doubt that your be able to stream a 40GB+ file fast enough over a network to keep a steady play back.
99 this is your deal, I dont have too much NAS expierence so you could clear it up.
That would be good, do you still have the brackets your clip the HD into? Its prolly the same type one i have, shit works great and is tool-less which is nice too
I am interested in this now… so far looking around on the web it looks like even at gig ethernet, you wont see anwhere near 1gbps real transfer speeds from one HD on a pc/storage box over a network through a router to another pc and its HD. Turns out the pci bus gets bottlenecked at 1.06gbps itself.
If you were to do it off site, I think you would have to copy over the movie you want to watch and view it locally and delete it off the local HTPC box’s hard drive.
I am going to go home and expierement a little myself I think tonight.
Cant you get a NIC for pci-x bus? Would that increase bandwidth?
Using a NAS to playback BluRay over a network, expecially a wireless is pointless. Run a direct from the NAS to your output setup or, if you are really anal about it, use the NAS in conjuction with the system you have setup now, using the NAS primarily for quick/efficient storage for your movies, that you can grab and play from your current setup.
Why don’t you get rid of your HTPC case, get a massive full tower case, put it in a different room and get a longer DVI/HMDI cable. extend you USB and sound and be done?
BD Video movies have a maximum data transfer rate of 54 Mbit/s
802.11G will do that, at a max. 802.11N will give you head room.
gig ethernet maxes out around 800 Mbit/s worth of real data payload. so it will be plenty
but check this out:
With that bad boy, you can put your sata 3.5" drives into that and connect it over e-sata which is plenty fast to the machine. It even comes with a pci esata controller card if your mobo doesnt have one on it.
or you can get a bunch of these:
then get some pci esata controllers and connect them and stack them up next to the pc.
That too. Get your audio over HDMI working on that machine and put it in the room behind/next to the tv room. wack a hole in the wall and pass a 15’ HDMI through.
I really like it to be wireless because we use laptops in other parts of the house to watch movies. I am going to copy a blu-ray to my other server in the room and stream it. I’ll post results.
I am rather interested to see how well it will stream, buffer and play back over the wifi.
What 802.11 are you running, any encryption? I still think for 80$ you can throw those 2tb drives in that esata enclosure, connect them to the main HTPC and that will yield the best results on the main movie tv. then the laptops around the house will work wifi from that machine… if it works. I hope it does.