So I bought this cheap little network-attached storage (NAS) device the other day (http://bit.ly/dns-323). It's got a 500MHz ARM processor and 64MB memory. There's a nice wiki (http://wiki.dns323.info/) with howtos for the power user.
It includes a web interface, UPnP server, iTunes server, FTP server, Samba server, and add-ons from D-Link that you can install. The latest firmware runs a 2.6.12 kernel. I installed a debian chroot onto it and so now I can ssh into it and run a bittorrent client.
I've read that with both drives spinning, it will will use roughly 25W.
So, I store almost everything on the file server and access files over the network.
RAID is for redundancy, not backup! Therefore, I opted to format the drives separately and backup one drive to the other. I heard about a nice idea to buy another drive, store it offset, and rotate it with the backup drive every month. I might consider doing this in the future.
