I've had a storage server running for a good while now at home. I have it running Gentoo Linux. For the storage drives, I have a RACKABLE SE3016-SAS hooked up via SAS cable. I have it running software RAID5 right now. Need to get a new drive, and upgrade it to 6 one day. I like that one since when I get a new drive, I just slap it in, and the system sees it. I've never had any issues other than my own mistakes. I'd either get a small SSD drive, or an extra HDD drive you have laying around. You don't need speed, just something to boot the OS. You'll need to setup Samba in Linux. That's how you share files with Windows.A basic setup isn't too hard.
I just upgraded my server to a real server board running dual Xeon's. And, I have ESXi setup on it now. I've got 4 servers running on it doing several things.. web/mail/media/streamer.