Are you drowning in terabytes of media files? Constantly running out of disk space to store your videos, music, and/or photos? Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a media server with vast reserves of storage where you could dump your ever-expanding digital collection without worrying about filling up your harddrive?

You may have even looked into buying or building a media server in the past, but perhaps were put off by high prices and/or complexity. What if I told you that you could build a power-efficient, high-availability, expandable media server without investing in any expensive specialized hardware (e.g.: no hardware RAID controllers, server-class processors or memory, or enterprise-level disks), and that you could be up and running in one afternoon—even if you don’t have any previous experience with this sort of thing?

How does 15 terabytes of storage for about $1,000 sound? Or 33TB of storage for under $2,000? How about if this server consumed less than 50 watts while idle (under 100 watts during normal operation)? Sound impossible? Read on to learn how.