Sysadmin as well, proudly running a 4U supermicro box as my home fileserver. If I can find a tower that can hot swappably fit that many drives, I'd look twice,

Sysadmin as well, proudly running a 4U supermicro box as my home fileserver. If I can find a tower that can hot swappably fit that many drives, I'd look twice, but there are some other small advantages. Redundant power is nice in some situations, as is ECC if you really care about that sort of thing. Finally, given the sheer amount of processor overhead a dual socket gives you, it was easy for me to also utilize the machine as a VM server. As other posts have pointed out, an out of box IPMI system is additionally hard to turn down; these are all capabilities that I simply have not found together in commodity products. My point I guess, is that I think there's still situations that merit rolling your own "Server box", even at home. (Not to disagree with anything you said, but to provide my own outlook)