You still need a USB drive and if planned to use it with a 1TB of music, then your only viable option currently is a hard disk drive, perhaps larger SSDs will be out. So the BDP-1 doesn't solve this issue in all situations, perhaps when they implement the NAS feature then it might.
Since USB, IDE, SATA, Ethernet and even PCIe can all share the same analog phy design you will have the same electrical noise pollution whether the HDD was internal using SATA/IDE/USB or external using USB. The BDP-1 doesn't solve this issue.
Select a mobile drive and you can go fanless pretty easily otherwise it just takes a bit of design skill to properly design a case for ambient cooling.
Redundancy isn't a form of backup in my book, but a form of reliability. If a HDD was included internally there should be a mechanism to backup the drive to either a file share or to an external drive. Since the BDP-1 doesn't provide that ripping mechanism, this isn't required, even if it had an internal HDD.
Design the box so the HDD is user serviceable. Perhaps use enterprise standard for hot-swappable drive bays where they slide in and out.
Technically a "USB drive" can be a "thumb drive" or a "RAID" unit with 4 or more drives. The BDP-1 OS doesnt care or understand what its talking to as long the device presents itself to the BDP-1 as a USB drive.
So the best "pure" solution for the BDP-1 is:
1- Purchase a 2 drive RAID 0 solution (ie one drive mirrors the other) or if you need lots of space a 4 drive RAID-5 solution from someone like LaCie
2- connect this to your PC and burn baby burn
3- get a super long USB cable (with built in extender)... say 15-25 feet long
4- stick the RAID unit in one room and run the cable to the BDP-1
5- make sure you connect the RAID unit to a UPS power unit
note: You do not need to be a computer wizz to configure the RAID unit... they come pre-configured and if the setting isnt what you want it is easily changed. You also cant screw it up as they are an "appliance" with a very limited choice of options.
This solves all the issues. You get a robust disk drive platform with automatic disk redundancy. The drives are hot-swappable.
I aggree that if you are smart enough then backing this RAID unit up makes sense but I disagree about the noise. It doesnt matter how noisey (mechanical/electrical) it is... the BDP-1 wont see this from another room over USB.
If you have more money, you can buy commerically available units that provide not only the RAID stuff but also have an inbuilt CD drive. These are basically customised PC's
And of course for the computer geeks, just build your own PC with a RAID card and drives.
So thats three levels of "NAS" for varying levels of computer skills.
While in the pure technical sense a RAID enabled USB connectible disk unit isnt NAS, in the broader sense it is a NAS. NAS typically implies connection over Ethernet but in the more broader sense, a RAID enabled USB drive unit connected to the BDP-1 is a "network" (although its point to point).