Finally! Yesterday bought and assembled a little puppy for home file server. Pretty cool one, compact, can be easily put anywhere needed, low noise too.
Runs Sourcemage Linux, a source-based Linux distribution (i.e. you need to compile software, no fancy gui). Considering all tasks it should do is to run ProFTPd, Apache, MySQL, archiving procedures, XML processing and other server stuff it doesn't need any input. SSH remote control. TorrentFlux for dl/seeding. Occasionally burning backup DVDs by schedule (cron) or remote calls. Console only, no X.
Final cost was $780. Ain't cheap I know, I could built it from my old hardware, except for hard drives, but the point was making a small size low noise system and put it off. And since my old equipment was AMD-based I had to buy full set for this one (it's Intel-based).
Haven't installed and configured all stuff so far, takes time. For the start got ProFTPd running and archiving process using p7zip. It works really well and fast compared to my previous system actually which had a sort of bottleneck due to EVMS volume made from two different hard drives.
Personally I like this one, there is some space for expanding it further if needed.
Yea, no X, no need for that one. Perhaps the last piece of equipment I need to buy is KVM, but there is a slight problem: both my displays on main PC are DVI-D. This puppy has DVI-D too (as well as D-Sub), but finding two-port Soho-class KVM with DVI seems to be a problem here.