[Wlug] On the subject of building systems - Re: PC-BSD, FreeBSD, and iXsystems - anyone know about them?

It has been ten years since I built a system and I figure I should do it again to refresh my skills. I took a look at motherboards and processor combinations and I was overwhelmed by the proliferation of choices. What I was wondering if I could get the members of the group to share the basic configuration of systems they have built to give me an idea of what I should look at. I want to build a compute/file server. I do a lot of heavy duty software development using the Eclipse IDE and the Java and C++ Development tools. Also, I need to store a lot of data - mostly images. My house is wired with a 1GB Ethernet so I have good bandwidth to access the server. Thank you for any help. -David