Help configuring new server build...

[mr.radon]

Well I'm an avid shutter bug. I'm reaching 80% on my 3.1Tb Server. Been looking at migrating to a new one. Been a couple of years since I built a system. This is what I have spec'ed out so far:

Backplane	AMS DS-3151SSBK 3.5" Black SATA SATA Backplane Module
Case	Lain Li PC-A77B
CPU	Intel Core2 Quad Q9400
CPU Fan	ZALMAN CNPS9500
Graphic Card	EVGA 896-P3-1265-AR GeForce GTX 260
Memory	OCZ Reaper HPC (8Gb)
Mother Board	GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P
Power Supply	ZALMAN ZM850-HP 850W
Raid Controler	Areca ARC-1260
Raid Hard Drives	750Gb SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1

I plan on installing three of the backplanes to hold 15 hard drives. The PC-77 case can hold another three inside.
I'm planing on running Vista 64 bit.
After build I will create a Raid 6 from 15 drives and leave the 16th one installed inside the case as a hot spare. This should give me about 9.7Tb.

Is it possible to install Vista on a Raid 6 drive? The manual for the ARC-12XX says that the Raid volume can be bootable?

I would really like suggestions as I have not yet made the buy from Newegg.

[Darthtanion]

I generally recommend having a single drive for the OS or a RAID1 for redundancy. From there you can build any sized RAID for your storage need. Even on the servers we build at work (used for evidence storage) uses a single drive setup for the OS and several drives for storage in RAID with hot spares in place. This keeps the data safe and ensures the OS cannot crap out and corrupt your important data. Windows has become more and more reliable over the years, but I still don't implicitly trust it.