Did you consider a low power NAS approach? Spending somewhere around $20 per month on electricity for a home server seems like a lot to me. Maybe if it was hosting a handful of VMs for various purposes, but I suppose you don't want to run a NAS as a VM?
Nope, never considered low power. I really didn't want a CPU bottleneck when I move to 10Gb network interface. Running a NAS in a VM (at least FreeNAS) is highly discouraged, so I never considered that. I do, however, run several VMs on the NAS itself, which help to justify the overkill hardware I used.
well there are tradeoffs. If you want low power and high performance, you come down to choosing between either SSDs (very expensive) or a lot of laptop drives (cheap, but higher latency; throughput for something like video is fine though as you can fit a lot of them in a chassis; switching from 8drive Z2 groups to mirrors gets you a 4x improvement in throughput, which completely negates the throughput disadvantage of 5400 vs 7200).
