Thanks washu. I'll give that a shot now.

MikeC -- Haha, secretly that doesn't sound so bad (don't tell the wife) :P , but currently the rear fans are the loudest part so I'm working on finding silent replacements. I'll do it part by part till it's as quiet as possible. Good thing is the kids have music playing which is slightly louder so i...

Due to its availability I ended up going with the GA-H57M-USB3 board with 4GB Corsair XMS3 CMX4GX3M2A1600C9 and Corsair VX-450 450W PSU. With 5 2TB drives the RAID 5 initialization took around 3 days and almost a week for the format (7.5TB). I encountered some issues with what looked like the i5 gra...

<150Mb/s as in 19MB/s approx. Might stick to RAID 5 and see how speedy I can get it. At least that way I'll have a lot more storage!

Leaning towards buying the EVO now. Easier on the wallet and has all the features I require.

I was concerned because I had been reading about slow RAID 5 configurations (<400Mb/s read and <150Mb/s write) and wanted to get the most out of my setup. But these could have simply been crappy RAID 5 implementations, and can't envision myself having the same issues. RAID 10 would have at least red...

The case I am using is pretty good for noise reduction, and the HDDs (for the RAID 10) are WD20EARDS; which are 5400RPM?? Haven't decided whether or not I'll be spinning them down at night as yet. Looking into pros and cons of this. RAID 10 mate, so 6TB. Storing the usual stuff; photos, movies, etc....

And here I was thinking how setting up a cheapish/low-powered RAID was gonna be easy! :P Thanks again for all the info guys. I had no idea about non-RAID HBAs and fake raid. So to keep the speed up I've decided on RAID 10. Which means hardware RAID; as Windows 2008 doesn't support it. Which kinda su...

Thanks for the responses! I'm no hardware guru so I really appreciate all your input. What would the benefit be for choosing Q57 over H57? Is the i5 661 a good choice for what I have planned? washu: I was planning on using onboard hardward RAID if possible as I didn't want to shell out on an expensi...

Hi, I recently acquired an Intel i5 661 CPU and some WD 2TB Green HDDs and was thinking of using them to build a low-powered file server (which seems to be the trend at the moment). I have an old Antec SOHO 1080AMG case and am hoping for advice on a motherboard, RAM and power supply. Would like to f...