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1GB is 1GB of RAM. It doesn't seem to have onboard ROM, but SD slot surely will support up to 32GB. And it has 10/100 Ethernet besides USB, though latter is probably suitable enough to "connect a lot of disk space".

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I know, but 1GB of RAM isn't that lot if I want at least reasonably fast file sharing (especially if the primary storage would be the harddisks via USB), run some network services and even some desktops apps via networked X11, which is roughly what I want (so I'm asking if this is the 'doing it wrong' case).

I would guess you are overestimating the memory footprint of your applications (unless you are planning on running Eclipse/Firefox/etc.) on the box.

USB2.0 will push 480Mb/sec which is probably sufficient for streaming content.

My wireless router has 64MB of ram and is capable of running as a NAS device if you plug a USB enclosure into it.

Only time you would run into issues is if you were using something like ZFS that keeps an in memory ARC cache. If you want to run X11 apps, just get a linux computer.

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