Just built one myself. Here's what I used:
- Jonesbo N2 case
- Topton/CWWK/BKHD NAS motherboard from AliExpress - includes N5105 or J6412 processors, 2 M.2 slots and 2x ddr4 slots. They haven't started rolling out N100 boards yet otherwise I would have gone for that.
- 32gb ddr4
- EVGA supernova 450gm power supply. Overkill but they don't make many sfx power supplies that are fully modular.
- 2x1tb nvme drives
- Case has 5 hdd bays for a pretty decent amount of media storage.
Cost me less than $600 USD not including any HDD. Modifying this a little could probably put you under $500
Prior to this I used an old Optiplex 3040 sff ($100) with a 1tb HDD and core i3 6100 and replaced the cd drive with a SSD bay so I could boot the OS off of that. It worked for a budget but didn't have any expandable storage.
The scene uploads to their own ftp servers. Someone who has access to those servers then uploads to usenet or torrent sites.