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I am hoping to set up some media streaming in my house, and I'm thinking about repurposing my G3 tower as a NAS to store all of my music and photos. It will be wired into my home network. I figure that all that I need is a decent size hard disk (the G3 just has a 6 GB drive). Once I get that, I will set up sharing, and I'm all set. G3 will be in the basement, so no noise issues, and I will wipe the hard drive so that it will be dedicated to acting as a NAS.

I will stream content to a TiVo Series 3 in the den using their built in home media capabilities.

Any suggestions for hardware (hard drive)? I am concerned that after long periods of inactivity, many drives will spin down and I will be running down to the basement every time I want to access it.

Also, are there any software add-ons that people know about that can help me optimize performance/more esily manage this machine as a NAS?

You can prevent the drive from spinning down by setting the option in Energy Saver options; by unchecking the option, that should keep your drive from sleeping.

Look at getting either VNC or some remote control software equivalent as well if you need to access the GUI after setting it up. Otherwise, enabling SSH for basic machine control (create/delete files/directories as needed).

Great feedback, thanks! I got burned on this issue by an external hard drive purchase in the past and was thinking that I would run into the same problem--I forgot that I could use the energy saver option on an internal. DUH!

I was definitely going to use some remote control software as well, thanks for the tip.