I’ve been spending alot of time lately thinking about my home network setup. By putting MCE into the closet and building it out with 1TB of RAID storage, I was able to solve both my home storage and media distribution problems in the house. It’s still kind of annoying though that I have this huge honking tower in the closet running 24/7.

I’ve been looking at various NAS devices lately (such as the Infrant ReadyNAS or the TeraStation) and while they almost fit the bill (I’d be set if the Xbox 360 supported video over UPNP, so it looks like i’ll need some sort of MCE in the mix), I started to wonder: Why doesnt someone just build an 802.11g (or n) wireless router/access point that has both gigabit ports and a USB 2.0 host controller?

Netgear is almost there with their RangeMax Gigabit Edition - but lacks the USB controller that their WGT634U media router had. Think about it: if the router had UPNP (or DLNA), Bonjour, DAAP, SMB and perhaps built in TwonkyVision it would be able to replace most of the function that my home server has today, and have the extendability to plug in more storage via USB whenever needed.