New build, need hardware suggestions

[n25philly]

Hi everyone, let me start off by apologizing if I'm asking things have have been done to death but I just spent the last hour in these forums just getting really confused. I want to build a large raid that is mainly going to be used for personal use. As of right now I have about 2-3 gigs of things to backup but I am a photographer so that can grow really fast. At the moment I've got pretty good storage on both my home and work computers and I've been using Windows Live mesh to sync my important files between the two. That's nice as a way to have the files in multiple locations, but not a good backup plan as I had to reformat my home computer right before new year and my files just finished copying over today! As a secondary item I would like to also use it as a remote backup for the important information from my server at work. (I don't have a data number on that but it's not huge and I would prefer to do an incremental if possible.

I don't have a lot of hardware bought so far. Just 6 3tb western digital Red drives (got them all on sale!) and a fractal design node 304 case. I think that the storage will be enough and I got the case from a post someone put on another site about building a FreeNAS box that I was going to follow but like an idiot didn't save. I'm not overly worried about price as I would rather have a really good build that will last a long time than cheap out now, but I also don't want to spend money for the sake of spending money. I just want reasonable speeds that are faster than getting my files over my dsl connection and peace of mind that I would lose any of my important files.

A big thank you ahead of time for anyone who helps me!

 

[gpsguy]

Do a forum search for "mini-itx" to find out what other's are using.

Depending on how you read the doc's, you'll need at least 16Gb of RAM, for your hard disks. On the mini-itx board, you'll have limited memory slots and pci/e expansion slots.

I went down this road last year, with a similar case (Lian Li q08b), 2 drives, and a Zotac mobo. It developed serious hardware problems and I scrapped it for another system.