I had the same problem as you. The NAS was not fast enough.
Next to that, I needed more than just firefly. I use SSH, FTP, webserver, DB, torrents (!) aswell.
I survived using all those on the Conceptronic CH3SNAS. (MediaStore)
It has a 500mhz proc and 64mb ram.
Still, in idle, 128 ram was used. (Standard 64mb from swap, ouch!)
This resulted in real slow response times, and worst of all, when doing a DAAP list, it took about 10 seconds to index all files. (I have 100GB of music. ~20K songs.)
A week or 2 back I was sick of the slowness, so I bought a compact PC.
Believe it or not, it is smaller than the CH3SNAS. I bought the Intel Atom 230 (which is in the Asus EEE 901 series) on a mITX board. Of course, with the necessary extra hardware: Power, HD, Case, RAM.
In the end I ended up paying 2X as much for the case than for the motherboard+proc. Why? Because there was no decent case for what I wanted. All mITX cases out there are quite small, and I wanted a passive cooler on the board. So the only case with the needed height above the MBoard was quite expensive.
Right now, I’m at work, listening to my music using the server.
The speed increase is incredible. The indexing of music is instant instead of 10 seconds, and it even runs an X desktop! (Linux with GUI, for non-linux people)
In the end, I ended up at ~400 euros with the following specs:
– Intel Atom 230 @ 1.6GHz
– Onboard GMA350(?) Intel Accelerated Graphics
– 2GB RAM
– 750GB HDD
I’m very happy with this toy. 🙂