NAS

Placing your digital media collection on a NAS has a number of benefits:

• Protects your digital media files - if the NAS has RAID capability (hard-drive redundancy), you are protected from failure of any one of the drives in your system
  

• High availability - Many NASes draw very little power when they are idle, so they can be left permanently switched on.  This means you wont have to wait for computer to boot before you can start streaming music
  

Additionally, some NASes are capbable of running a media server.  This relieves your computer of one more task, and increases availability of your audio.

DLink DNS 323

The DLink is a cheap NAS, with RAID 1 capability.  The drive has poor firmware out of the box, (the pre-installed UPnP server is seriously broken), but it can be upgraded to run Twonky Media Server.

Installation experience of Twonky is relatively straight-forward if you are prepared to follow the instructions to install "fun_plug", (http://wiki.dns323.info/howto:fun_plug) and the Twonky installation instructions (http://www.twonkyvision.com/Download/TwonkyMedia/TM4Technicians.html)
* 2 disk SATA
* RAID 0,1,JBOD
* Linux ("busybox") based
* DHCP
* pre-installed uPnP server (DLink custom)

Minimum requirements:

• DHCP server

• RAID (at least levels 1 or 5)

• Supports TwonkyMedia 4.4 (for UPnP AV 1.0)

• High end read throughput (> 15 Mbps)

• Gigabit Ethernet

• Samba/CIFS server

• Easy configuration

• Scriptable remote configuration/setup

• Easy installation of TwonkyMedia server

NAS that Linn have approved* for use:

• Infrant ReadyNAS NV+

• An approved device is one that meets all the system requirements for that product type, and has additionally been tested by Linn. Many other non-approved devices will work perfectly well with DS players. However, it is possible you will encounter issues with poorly implemented third-party products that impact the performance of the DS system.