[eddietop]

Noise wise its almost silent, i have it had in my office and i can hardly hear it, the only moving parts are the disks and a small fan on the back but it's making hardly any noise.

Here are some good reviews if you want to read further into heat/power;

http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/Reviews/T...eview.html

http://www.wegotserved.com/2009/01/25/ha...me-server/

http://m0dlx.com/blog/Tranquil_PC_BBS2_f...cking.html

Mine hardly produces any heat, and that's with 5 1tb drives stuffed into it, the atom is a really cool running chip.

As for managing the raid, i think the card is SiliconImage SiI3124. It's managed vis the bios, and you can hotswap drives i believe. I am personally not using the raid controller, i have joined all my disks into a massive share, with no redundancy.

The raid controller comes configured with either 4 drives attached, or 3 drives and the ESATA port. If your planning on raiding its probably best to order with the 4 drives on the raid controller.
You also have the software raid option available to you if you decide to ever go the Linux route.

It's not as simple as just buying an off the shelf NAS shoving disks in, and off you go. Your basically setting up a server to share your media for you, but the flexability you gain for doing it this way is worth it IMO. Also in my experience NAS torrent servers are really lacking feature wise.