NAS HDDs

[SeVeReD]

I'm about to duplicate for a friend what I've got going on for myself.  At the moment I use Western Digital Mybook Premium Edition IIs (2TB a piece; usually about $400. each) daisy chained through firewire 400. I don't care too much about speed of pulling my WAV/CUE file off the HDD, because of using XXHighEnd and it loads the entire album into RAM before it starts to play it...I don't like to have other programs running when listening to music and I don't like having wireless stuff going, so,..(ok, ya I think it can interfer with the presentation).
My question about NAS
Does it show up like regular HDDs in Explorer, or do I have to have another program running along with XXHE to access the HDDs on the lan.... I do all my back up manually and keep backup HDDs offsite... so I only need to run raid 0. so, how do I pull the files off the HDD with a nas? Can I see them with Explorer going to network places probably? noob ?
I'm happy with my firewire HDDs, but if NAS is the better way, then I want to do right by my friend.

[PeterSt]

Hi Dave,

To be honest, I'm not sure.
I am fairly sure at least some special driver will be running/needed in order to access that NAS drive(s), and you will have some additional Ethernet traffic floating about. I can't tell the effect of that, and the only thing I can tell (but who can't) is that normal Ethernet traffic won't bother you.

The driver will have (or can have if you want) a normal driver letter, so no problems to be expected there.

May the drives (be able to) spin down, don't ask me whether *that* works out allright. I think it should be okay, but just the same a part of the system may be stalled, waiting for them to spin up, and if that part is the wrong part, no sound (until they spin).

The most probable for a negative could be the way the drives are organized internally. I mean, chances are fairly high that the method for storage used is so that the sequence of files is not according the alphabet, but according the time of creation. And *that* is something you sure won't like (it is just way inconvenient). How to know this in advance ? ... I don't know. Test it somewhere where it is running I guess.

Peter