My Home NAS box

I've wanted to have a home network attached storage (NAS) box for a while now. The idea of having a few hard drives in RAID configuration to protect against data loss through faulty hardware really appealed to me. So after considering the few NAS options that are out there such as the Synology CS-406e and the QNAP TS-409, I thought it would be more cost effective and flexible to build my own from scratch.

After a lot of deliberation I finally settled on the following components (at time of writing these made sense):

• Antec Sonata III case
• Large enough for 4x 3.25" HDD trays with rubber grommets, 2x 3.5" HDD bays, and 3x 5.25" drive bays; future expandability. It also has been reported on the Net as being pretty quiet and good value.
• Gigabyte GA-G33-DS3R motherboard
• Full sized ATX motherboard that will fit in the Antec case. Has 8x SATAII connectors for future expandability. Onboard video solution to minimise power draw from unnecessary components. Gigabit ethernet for maximum file transfer speed.
  
• Intel Dual Core E2160 processor
• Not much difference in cost and power consumption between this and E1200 ie Celeron. Performance shown to be much better.
• 2x 1GB Kingston PC6400 DDR2 RAM
• Because 2 is better than 1GB ;-)
  
• 2x 500GB WD HDD
• Web reviews state they are very quiet. Less expensive than Seagate.

I plan to install openSUSE 10.3 on this home server, RAID1 the hard drives initially and then migrate to RAID5 at later date to increase capacity. Will advise how things go...

UPDATED: Added 2x more 500GB Samsung HDD