Hmmm. Even though I almost always have my computer on when I'm home, in addition to my NAS, I still like having the NAS around as the central backup for the network and having my media ready to stream in the instances when I do power my computer down. The sharing seems like less of a headache overall, too. With the DLNA and innate transcoding, it's kept me from having to deal with a lot of software and settings work on my Windows machine. Still, there's more I could do with my NAS that I just haven't been curious enough to try yet. I could probably get even more out of it. But yeah, they can be expensive, so throwing more space into an existing machine would certainly be the cost-effective solution.
