Comment Low-power, high-capacity (Score 1) 609
Cheap solution:
- Buy an atom-based motherboard with SATA and PCI slots (Since it's a home server, you probably won't need a beefier CPU.)
- Put SATA cards in said PCI slots
- Put it in a huge case, invest in hard disks
You can easily get a NAS with six SATA drives that will run at less than 200 watts (you can save a lot there if you have drives spin-down while idle, but I'm told this reduces their lifetime.)
I have a similar machine set up in my closet serving up 2TB of space to my network. It costs about $5/month in energy to keep it on 24/7.