I want to make a file server to place elsewhere in my home. Basically to get that hard drive noise away from me and support more drives than my machine would likely be able to cool efficiently. I know some people here have drives located elsewhere, so I thought those of you could offer some insight.

Basically, I want something with the bare minimum of hardware that can support a couple normal IDE drives and a large number of SATA drives via SATA controller card(s).

What would be the best way to go around this? Obviously, I plan on expanding this a small amount at a time (like one drive at a time). It's going to take long enough for me to find the disposable income to piece the machine together, let alone outfit it with a bunch of drives.

So, should I just go with a standard PC, and find a case, mobo/CPU/RAM, big-ass PSU, cheapo vid card, and a SATA controller card (one to start)? Or is there some other solution I could look into. *edit* for that matter, for a simple file server, would SATA drives even be necessary? I just figured it would be a little easier to fit multiple drives in there if they were SATA drives and controllers. */edit*

And what are the requirements for a computer that will be doing next to nothing other than serving files to another machine? How much memory do I need? For that matter, do I even need an OS? Is there a way to set it up without one?

Thanks for your help.

*edit*
ps- yes, I was recently asking questions about the server I got from my office. However, there's only 80GB of space, and I don't fancy replacing all the Seagate SCSI drives in the RAID, and the machine is pretty old anyway. I do, however, plan on using it in the future as a web server. I also want to get my other drives out of my current machine.