Software RAID and backup altogether

Solution 1:

1) @Linker3000's suggestion in the previous thread is where I would point you at if you're looking at Homebrew solutions. That HP ProLiant Miniserver is energy efficient, powerful, and with 4 drives internal plus eSATA and USB, you will have plenty of storage.

2) Hard drives have normalized for me at least, in recent years. I've had everybody's disks fail, but I have had incredible luck (knock on wood) with Samsung for the most recent batch in my file server. I have two 750s that are due to be replaced this fall with a single 2TB drive.

3) Ubuntu Server has been a staple of my home network for 5 years now. Its stable, sees frequent updates, and isn't a nightmare to manage.

4) My daily cron job backup in one line:

rsync -rvogtb --delete --backup-dir=/media/disk0/backup /media/disk0/storage/ pollux:/media/disk0/storage/ >> /var/log/rsynctopollux.log

5) I use a homebrew file server with a cacophony of drives, and have been very happy with the solution. I'm looking heavily at prebuilt NASes purely to simplify things even more and make for less maintenance and management, plus I can't build boxes that are as small, energy efficient, quiet, and reliable as they are. My only hurdle now is isolating all the OTHER things that box does and trying to find a NAS solution with an embedded OS that will give me similar functionality.