Which external USB Hard Drive are yall using? I am about buy one and want to make sure i get one that will handle playing movies and wont crap out after a short period of time. Thanks in advance for the help.

I use an external case and put in my own (it's a NexStar 3 case). I've tried Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital Green drives. I like the Hitachi drives, but the new Samsung 5400 rpm drives is what I would get if I were buying now. You don't need a 7200rpm drive.

I also have a MacAlly usb/esata/fw-800 case which is very nice for booting my Mini but is a bit noisier than the NextStar 3 enclosures. All the enclosures are fanless (that I have).

The only brand name externals I have bought were from LaCie. Nice but expensive and not flexible.

I should point out that the ATV streams great so you don't need massive local storage.

ls

I tried streaming, but it looked grainy. I loaded the same movie on the ATV's internal drive and it looked perfect. BTW i have my movies converted to mp4. Should i convert to something else that is better to stream?

Hmm.... streaming is tricky. Lower resolution is no problem but higher resolution is obviously not going to work consistently. The native file format is mp4 (using the h.264 codec at the appropriate profile). Are you within the Apple TV guidlines? Unless you are a real videophile DVD resolution will stream fine over wireless G+ speeds.

I don't see how converting is going to help. Basically you either put things in .m4v ( like mp4) or use xvid with VideoDrive or ATV Fooler to make things simpler. Hard to say whether it's a network issue or a streaming issue.

ls