I've been buying parts to get this NAS started over the last month. I've got a generic p4 tower with both ide and sata on the motherboard. It has 2 HD slots, I'm attaching the other 2 hard drives to the cover of the tower with some spacers of some kind to keep the air flowing all the way around. I've got an ide to cf card adapter & a 2gb card for the free nas which I plan on using. I've got a couple case fans, a 3com nic card on the way, I've also got an 1700 apc ups to run it all through. I don't want to go cheap on the hard drives so I'm looking at 4 seagate enterprise 1tb drives sata drives, all new to put in a raid5 configuration to get roughly 3tb of space out of the deal. Now I'm thinking with $500+ worth of hard drives, I should get a good power supply as well. Here is one of my questions, I picked up a Corsaire 520w PS off ebay and I'm wondering, is this is over kill for wattage or do these only use what the system requires? And if it is over kill, how many watts would you recommend? And if I have a UPS, is a higher end power supply needed?

Also I've ordered a 4 port SATA RAID 0 1 5 10 Sil3114 PCI card Win 7 New http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160479254835&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT#ht_1554wt_788 to get all my hard drives working together. Should I not go with something so cheap here or does it not matter? What I'm asking is will free nas basically make it a software raid or will this card be able to make it a hardware raid? Which would I be better off with?

I'm just getting my puzzle pieces all together and I want to see the a picture of a good working nas box before it's done. The hard drives I'm holding off till the end (their the most expensive pieces in my puzzle).

Thanks for looking at my work in progress. I know I could have got the same size nas box off ebay for less than what I've got into this one but when you can tell people you built your own (and knowing I have good hard drives and power), it sounds more impressive.