Before you build, list what you want and need it to do, and what you are looking for and what level of redundancy. Reason I say this is that a few us intervening (in a good way) early might stop you from going Frankenstein on it. Probably no different results that you'll notice but sure as #&@^# safer for the rest of us
Seriously, I'm sure we could come up with a straight forward way of doing (say Dell or HP with Intel RAID1), Acronis or Storagecraft backup, yada, etc, yada