was thinking pretty much the same thing. any advice from current dedicated NAS box owners as well as those with homebrew Nas boxes - superczar, cisco_tech would be highly appreciated
AFAIK, a 500GB WD NAS (world edition or something) costs arnd 7K locally which makes it immense VFM
As for a real life comparison between the two, I have my dedicated NAS and my headless server box HDD both working as network drives
My laptops and HTPC map to these drives as y:\ and z:\ directly and the whole setup obviously is transparent with botht he drives appearing as local drives on the client machines
I see no difference between the performance between either and get between 6-8 MB/s transfer speeds on wired clients and 1.5-3 MB/s on wireless..
Neither do I ever see these ugly H**s since both are hidden inside a bookrack with only power/ethernet cables running to them
As for choosing one or the other,
NAS in a box: small, easy to setup, relatively low on power, no headaches
PC as NAS (setup headless): lot more flexibility and capabilities but is bigger, a lil more expensive, and eats more power...setting up takes quite a while but headacheless when done
a 500GB PC NAS will cost you arnd 8-9K with a D201GLY2, 512MB RAM, 500GB disk and cheapo smps ..all mounted on a plastic /plywood board
And the RAID setup is fairly reliable on both