I tried to get it setup once, but it doesn't work for my situation (for instance, my laptop is usually in hibernation when I'm at home. I have a connected disk that supports DLNA and I wish I could stream from that.) With this considered, just plugging in USB storage is fine. Not ideal, but fine.

Also, when I last tried to use Plex (though, this was more than a year ago), it was extremely clunky. Maybe things are different now, or maybe I was expecting it to behave differently, but I didnt like it.

plexapp is decent, but it really could be a lot better... I use it myself.