Computer nerds, please help

Hmm... even a low end Hush is in the $8/GB range... If you are looking for cost effective storage, A terastation is less than $1/GB, can be configured with RAID 5, and will run slimserver:

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=15671&highlight=terastation+slimserver

While the Hush PCs may look nice, the terastation is invisible, since you stick it in a closet. ;)

Check out Hush technologies. It's a german company that focuses on high quality, small, almost silent desktop computers and music servers that look like high-end audio amplifiers. (They look a lot like the Linn Klout in fact - Mmmmm). They are also quite reasonably priced by hi-end audio standards.

Another option is the Buffalo Terastation--its a NAS that can be configured as a RAID 5 drive (mine is). I also gather it will run slimserver, although I haven't tried that.

I use my Buffalo to store all my Apple Lossless files (//elvis/My_Music/Artist/Album/song.m4a) and also have a separate directory of duplicate AAC files for iPod use (//elvis/AAC_Files/Artist/Album/song.m4a). Because you can't tell ALAC from AAC from the file extension (.m4a in both cases), if you have multiple copies, you won't be able to tell which is which from a squeezebox. You also can't easily eliminate a class of songs from slimserver--hence the two directories (slimserver can be directory specific).