I think he means rack mount home servers, those are pretty nuts because of the noise that most rack mount cases make. Figure in a 1U case you normally have at least 4 15K RPM fans going at all times, even if you put it into "quiet" mode its enough to hear from the next room normally.

My rack mount case is silent enough to record with a high quality condenser microphone in the same room. But it is 4U with 120mm slow fans.

Its all about how you build them. Obviously a 1U with 40mm fans running fast could make a lot of noise.

In lieu of building a home server, I highly recommend the Synology line of NAS machines. They've got everything you could possibly want out of a home server, with a much faster configuration. Automatic backups, a built in Torrent server, Plex media server, and remote file access all in one container.

Seriously a great product and value if you're looking for a home server.

I don't want to come across as a comment crapper, but I've been recommending FreeNAS for years now. ZFS is perfect for home NAS purposes.

You're not comment crapping at all, you're offering a great alternative to those who are time rich / cash poor, or who like configuring and want to learn about building servers. For anyone who's cash rich and time poor, the NAS products from Synology are great.

That looks really nice! Torrent server is one of the primary uses I would need this for so it's tempting.

+1 I love my Synology NAS. Truly a great product.

HP makes a "Microserver" that's designed for home/office use: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-42...

Quiet, ECC RAM, and decent speed for most home-related tasks (backup, etc.)

I can highly recommend these. I recently got one of these for £100 (after cashback), and it is a brilliant piece of kit. I've got 4x1.5TB HDDs, and a 250GB OS drive, in mine, running Windows Server 2008 R2, and the performance is pretty good. 50MBps+ over a gigabit network is what I'm getting, which is more than enough for me.