Thanks for all the advice. I do actually have an old Win98 desktop that I could 'refactor' into a FreeNAS box, so I'll give that some thought. I have to say though, I'm quite swayed by the sheer shinyness of some of these specialised NAS boxes, and given that it will have to share space in my 7' x 4' "home office" I want something small and quiet. I wonder - the old box's BIOS probably requires a keyboard before it'll boot up, for example... a dedicated box would avoid that.
Cheers for now,
C.