A few things:
- The quad core processor is overkill. Windows won't use more than two cores anyways unless you're doing high end rendering or compiling programs or similar tasks. Save some money here.
- Windows 32 bit OSes will only use 4GB max, so more is useless unless you also run the 64 bit versions(note - Linux will handle more than 4GB happily)
- 800W power supply is overkill. Go to silentpc (
http://www.silentpcreview.com/ ) and ask around - you want a highly efficient and lower noise model if you can. My PC is a high-end two core model and I can hardly hear it when it's on thanks to about $150 in mods and careful component selection to quiet it. Far better use o money than a quad core CPU.
- Raid is asking for trouble on larger volumes. The problem is that large volumes exhibit bit errors and timeouts on a scale that results in a large number of dead arrays. It's a known problem with raid and enormous drives. (the issue is the bock sizes and the buffer timing out)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFSThis is the only known reliable option for using large drives that I know of in a RAID array.
If this seems to be overkill in terms of technical knowledge required, it is. Just use them as independent drives. RAID 0 is asking for trouble anyways. I have two big storage drives on my machine and so far no problems since I don't hammer them and they are just for data storage and swapping/downloading.
Plus, if the data drives only have data, recovering from a crash is really simple and most data recovery programs will do it quite well. It's the OS drive that makes you pull your hair out when it goes.(note - get identical drives when buying more than one drive - often it's the circuit board that dies and you can swap that onto the dead drive and often get it working enough to get the data off)
OTOH, the OS should be Raid 1. $60-$80 for a second drive is well worth it to have a backup copy of your OS is one drive fails. In fact, I put mine on two smaller 160GB drives to keep the cost down even more and potential recovery costs.(data recovery is usually based upon the total drive capacity and not the amount recovered).
As for drives? Western Digital GP for the main storage drives. They run cooler and cooler means longer drive life. The RAID/OS group should be the RE2 models made specifically for RAID.
But the guys over at SlientPC know far more about this than I do. Check them out.