Hi,
I have a fair idea of what I am wanting, but not a lot of clue as to how to go about it. I am wanting a NAS unit which will:

Share files over a network accessible to an Xbox running XBMC (Samba is easiest for me to set up)
Run an FTP Server accessible to the wider world (so I can add/remove/look at files from other locations)

and preferably, be able to stream photos, but this isn't essential.

I have a WGT364U router (with USB port), and I am able to flash the firmware to a homebrew distro, but I am, unfortunately, unfamiliar with linux, so might need a little help on that front.

Any ideas?

+1 for FreeNAS. I too am using it and works very well.

Heya,

Take any old computer that can run a hard drive in the capacity/connections that it requires. If it has USB/CDROM/Floppy, or any combination of those, you're in business.

+1 to FreeNas (www.freenas.org)

I use the floppy+CDROM method. It boots from CDROM and stores it's configuration on floppy. This leaves the harddrives completely free to be used as the network storage. I do this rather than installing it to one of the hard drives, because if that particular drive failed for some reason, suddenly you have no operating system running, whereas running it in memory from a booted CD/Floppy can survive a disk not responding/working, and the others will still work (unless of course, the motherboard/ram/controller is dead, then the whole mother is not gonna work). I like being able to know exactly which component is having trouble so I can address it fast and easy. This gives me the best bird's eye view of what my hardware is doing (or not doing).

FreeNAS lets you take that computer and it's drives and throw it on any network. Just plug it into your ethernet network. I highly recommend you use a 10/100/1000 NIC (gigabit) to have good speeds to keep up with modern drives (like 3g/s SATAII 7200rpm drives). Not an issue if you use really old 5400rpm drives/ide/etc. Samba and FTP (amongst everything else you can imagine) is built into FreeNAS and has a very easy to use WebGUI to set it up with. It also has a stupid-simple-video-tutorial of how to setup all of this, click by click, on their website in the support section. It's idiot proof. Literally.

Once you've got it setup, you can run headless with no input devices. Just put the box somewhere plugged in and forget about it. You can even set it to go to standby after set amount of times to conserve energy use, etc.

A simple system with some of the new `green' drives that use less power in a NAS that will go to standby and chill out when not being used after a set amount of time doesn't use much electricity so it shouldn't impact your electric bill in a way that makes you go "OMG!".

Cheers,