BrentonMcGhee :
Well your almost right. I am in the process of buying up parts for a new storage server at my house. Just like the article said once i started to rip my bluray collection i new just using my old desktop computer as a data dump would no longer suffice.
The parts you just listed are all fine except for the you left out a hardware based raid card. Yes you can use the sata ports on MB's most of which now come with at least 6. Or you can buy a few cheap add on sata controllers but the problem with this is that this offers you no data security.
You can set up a software based raid using your MB's sata ports on add on sata ports but the issue with software based is it is very volatile and having a mother board go belly up or even just reinstalling your operating system can cause you to have to kiss all of you multi terabytes of data good bye.
Pretty much everything about a homebrew storage server is cheap just like you listed except if you are gonna step up to hardware raid wich at least for me is very important. I would hate to have to spend a few months re ripping everything because i had to upgrade my mobo.
This needs a bit of further explanation. Any RAID setup is going to be formatted such that only the RAID controller that created the RAID can read it. This can be the following:
1. Hardware RAID card- you need to get an identical or nearly-identical (same manufacturer, probably the same model line) hardware RAID card to read your array if your original hardware RAID card dies.
2. Motherboard/BIOS-based RAID- you will need to get a motherboard with a similar southbridge chip to run your array if your original motherboard dies, since the southbridge chip runs the array.
3. Non-hardware SATA controller/RAID card- identical to the hardware RAID card. The only difference between an add-in hardware and non-hardware RAID card is that the hardware card offloads XOR calculations for RAID levels 4, 5, and 6 while non-hardware RAID cards let the CPU do this.
4. OS-based RAID (Linux md, Windows Dynamic Disks)- you need to put the disks in a computer running the same kind of OS that is at least as new as the OS on the old, dead computer. The hardware does not matter except that you need enough SATA ports to attach all of your disks- the OS does not care if the ports are on a motherboard or an add-in card.
If you want to have the easiest way to recover from hardware failure, go with an OS-based RAID. I run Linux md arrays and have moved the disks in the array from one machine to the next without issue. The real advantages of a hardware RAID card have to do with performance rather than data integrity.