Unless you're going to have your buds over to LAN at your house, with your server hosting the different multiplayer games and other things, the dual CPU bit is somewhat excessive. But if money is no object, I suggest building a huge freaking file server where the processor doesn't really matter. Think of two 8-way RAID-5 arrays of 250GB drives. Should give you about 3.5TB of storage space. Or you could go up to dual 12-way, and get ~5.5TB of space. At this point you'd need to definatley consider a parrallelized and redundant power delivery system in the $200+ to $500+ range, because the load would be enough from just the 16 drives to kill pretty much any consumer level powersupply.

My plans to utilize this storage would be to build a networked TiVO type system (with Linux & MythTV), where you could access videos and such from anywhere in your house. Probably a bit excessive on the storage front, but if there is absolutely no budget continue reading to where I show the cost of a fraction of this...

Of course the cost of just a single high quality 8-way 250GB RAID-5 HDD setup is going to be about $2K. That doesn't include solving the power issues, CPU, motherboard, or anything else like gigabit network.


BTW, Home Automation is called "Domotics" or something funky like that. I don't know too much about it, but this Wikipedia article has some links near the bottom that might be of interest -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_automation