Joseph L. Casale wrote:
The Dlink DNS-323 looks exactly what you are asking of
What a procedure to hack that thing!
The problem I see with going the all-in-one NAS route is that down the road, there's always some function you'd like to add - but you can't. You've hit the limitations of the box.
That's why I want to put straight Linux on it:)
As fun as hacking that thing would be, I might just buy one of the tiny boards, but for the price if I brick the DNS-323 it would still be fun and I wouldn't really care!
The most demanding operation you'd want such a server to do is probably feeding video/media files to a DLNA client like an xbox360 or PS3 which sometimes involves transcoding the content. You'd probably get the most specific advice about device capabilities on the forums for those programs (mediatomb, for example, which runs on a lot of the small network hard drives).