Fibre-Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) drives might be your friend. Connectors/cabling might be a bit pricey, not sure since I haven't checked on prices in awhile, but disks are dirt cheap and I think the cards are, too. With FC-AL you could locate the server inside your house and the disk array subsystem outside in the garage or someplace (by running a cable). You could buy a large server case that has a big disk backplane, and put in a few large drives to start with, and keep adding as you feel necessary.
I'd recommend you take a gander over at
http://forums.2cpu.com in their Storage section. There is a good number of people there with >1TB home storage systems, and a wealth of knowledge.
Good luck!
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