[scheides]

First off it'll be best to get your terminology straight....there's no such thing as RAIDs...RAID is a set of methods for setting up redundant disk.

Here's what I have run for the last several years:

Hardware:
4U cheapo rackmount case with room for like 10x 3.5" disks and a variety of ATX-sized motherboards
450W power supply (replaced this several times in the last 8 years)
2x 1TB Seagate disks
1x old computer guts...currently running:
-Basic ABIT motherboard
-AMD semperon 2200+
-768MB RAM
-few extra fans for good measure

So I ran mandriva linux on it forever but I swapped that out for Centos6 a while back. Disks are configured in Raid1 (mirror) with linux software raid, supported out of the box. I have samba configured to share out a directory and just copy files to/from that directory as I choose.

I have a 2TB exernal seagate disk that I wrote a simple script to mount and do full backups to once per month.

Upstairs I have a Western Digital WDTV. $99 and it does more than my appleTV ever did right out of the box.

The whole setup is super easy to maintain and cheap as hell....if I ever need more space I'll just convert to a striped RAID5 setup or multiple RAID1 mirrors. 1TB has proven to be plenty for me, I don't need to keep old copies of 80% of the movies that land on it, I'll just re-download them if I really want them again.

You could skip the USB drive thing and just run backups to an internal disk but that adds a little risk I guess.

What services do you need for your setup? Does it have to run windows? The biggest thing is to just keep it dust free and not let the hardware get *too* old as that just is asking for problems with data corruption. And once you get a setup that works, don't mess with it too much. I touch mine about once every two years but I think I'm on like year 4 of this setup.