My NAS is separate from my HTPC, and in a different room to keep noise down. The HTPC is in a small case with very few lights to distract. It's a pretty minimal build, done that way on purpose. A Sandy Bridge G840, Radeon discrete GPU, 4 gig ram, Win 7 + XBMC. The NAS is a CentOS box with 8 2tb drives in a software RAID-6, XFS. I've got 11tb usable storage, about 50% full now. All DVDs are full disc ISOs. BluRays are MKVs of the main movie track only. Everything streams just fine over gig-e.