so is the primary goal is to satisfy curiosity/boredom? I doubt you will find this interesting unless you define your requirements a little better and go a level deeper. is this for business (uptime matters) or for home tinkering? what is your budget? does your budget account for software licenses (OS, virtualization ,etc)
if all you want is serving files - buy a cheap NAS , $100 will get you a basic Synology box, throw in HDD and external USB for backup and you are done. someone else takes care of software development for you, issues patches, provide 'apps' , etc. this would be power efficient, very cheap, very low touch, etc.
if you want something much more powerful but still very efficient and kind of current tech - Qotom sells industrial PCs for $150 that have current generation Celerons included. for $300 total (accounting for RAM + mSata drive), you can own current, supportable hardware, power efficient, and much better than any of the ARM CPUs in commercial NAS of the same price level. perfect Sophos, Pfsense, or other UTM box if you want to play with it. would give you LAN aggregation , etc assuming your physical network is set up in a way where it would make sense.
if you want (A LOT) power for (somewhat) cheap - buy/build used machine from circa Sandy Bridge technology. $500-$600 will get you motherboard plus couple of CPUs plus 128 GB of RAM , this is what you do if you want a lot of threads of memory for workloads you have in mind. downside - old recycled refurbished tech, power hungry, loud, and you are f$cked should it break as you will have limited to no warranty. also account for 'fun' of figuring out compatibilities, hunting out relevant software/drivers while messing with weird chipsets, etc. may or may not be your cup of tea but if you want 32 threads of powerful compute this is currently the way to go.
if you want real server, any major vendor (Dell/HP) would sell you one - plenty of power, supportable , somewhat efficient, somewhat less loud. no "fun" mentioned above, the only way I would consider for anything business related , but you pay for it.
Make your pick
as for server - I run homebuilt machine from Microcenter parts built in mid 2012 . it was originally for my wife's consulting business so I bought real server OS (Windows 2012 Essentials) and run it for 4 years. love it. My server provides a domain , full real Active Directory, single sign on, enforces policies, issues IPs, backs up my clients, backups to the cloud, runs DLNA server, runs virtualization software ,etc. If I were to do it all over again, I would not have went with K CPU (never overclocked but now am missing the VT-D), I would also probably not used hardware RAID on HDDs from the start (corrupted data duplicated is still corrupted data, rather have multiple copies on non redundant drives vs single copy of fault tolerant array).
as my needs changed, my requirements for server changed as well - I started wanting to have dedicated virtualization lab area and completely separate it out from my domain (into separate VLAN) , I also wanted to get the data out form domain controller that runs everything and into NAS systems. so bought a much lower power hardware for the actual domain controller, added another NAS to the mix to cross replicate between two NAS devices (plus USB backup), moved formatted media ready to play out to the Nvidia Shield and left the old hardware as pure virtualization thing.
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