I'm happy they didn't Railven. I don't need a $600 GPU for the games I'm playing. None of them are titles beyond the year of 2012 which is on purpose since I haven't played ANYTHING lol so there is so much for me to play. At $600, I would have purchased that haha. 4K downsampling over 1800p downsampling would be nice! And I'm insane enough to pay an extra $400 for that lol.
Well, maybe it's just my past experience here, when I tried such a setup (a couple of years ago) I found the speed and general handling of such a combination to be not that great. And browsing through ATs latest consumer NAS boxes makes me think that not that much has changed, with them crawling around 50 MB/s when it could just as well be 120 MB/s with the HTPC being your NAS with built in drives.
I think, while what you do is a viable way to set up a HTPC, it's also that, well, setup hurdle that keeps HTPCs from wider adoption. Because my impression is that "Many users are using things like intel NUC's or other SFF PCs with only a small OS drive" really isn't as many people as us regulars in tech forums think.
Majority of people aren't differentiating between the 50 MB/s vs the 120 MB/s. I don't even notice. I just click and drag and move a file then when it's done it's done.
Either way, I get the full speed of my HDD over my network from my main NAS. My download server on the other hand is usually 50 MB/s. Don't know why, but I have 32TB of storage so far (37TB shortly I just need to stop being lazy and add a new drive as I have no storage left again), and I haven't run into an instance where it has been a nuisance as I'm rarely moving things around that I need right NOW. It's a storage thing you use to access your movies, tv, games, etc. it rarely is dependent on access speed.
But many many many people are happy their NAS and recommend them. Why? Because they aren't transferring files back and forth all of the time. Pretty much the majority of things I access are on my "NAS". Why? Because it makes no difference whether the speed is 50 MB/s vs 120 MB/s for the vast majority of things I access. You can install games, or do whatever from your NAS.
Is it the norm? Of course not, many people are holding on to very very old setups. Is it the future? Yes, and it's being pushed more and more. Portable wireless HDDs that you never have to take out of your travel bag for use with your ultra slim laptop, or use with a tablet, or a phone. People are starting to realize there are benefits in keeping your storage medium separate from your actual device. This is why Cloud Storage is taking off and you're limited by the speed of your INTERNET connection in that case. Yet people still are purchasing massive amounts of cloud storage and the industry is taking off.
I understand your reluctance, but this is a growing trend among the consumer market.
There will always be a place for users who want it all in one device of course. But users are seeing the benefits of keeping everything separate, and now that the HEDT platform has mini ITX boards, I will be super excited to see just how tiny we can get a top of the line gaming system that still has great cooling and acoustics and performance.
Like I said though, this will interest people who are into things like Kodi.TV. It may not interest people with more traditional setups. But take a look around the AVSForum/Kodi.TV to see there is growing market of people who want this stuff, and it'd be insane for companies to ignore it as that's throwing money away and that pains my heart to even think about.