tvieson, I just built a ten bay Mediaserver that is basically EXACTLY what you want, so let me weigh in:
-Your CPU is WAY too powerful. You waste so much with that thing. My ten bay media server can stream my Blu Rays/mkvs to all my clients (up to gigabit network limits- so all four of my clients) and it has a dual core 1.6GHZ celeron CPU and 2GB RAM. If you really are going to be JUST serving media, then get a weaker CPU.
-The power supply is WAY too big for ten drives. Here is what I have for my ten bay server:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product
Its actually on sale right now. Seriously, any larger and you will be wasting big time.
-Go for a PCI GPU so you can save the PCI Express slot for something like this:
http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=AOC-...dd-on-Card
Here is a good PCI gpu card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6814130188
-The case is ok, but if you would prefer a tower (with larger and more quiet fans) I just built my ten drive media server in an Antec 300:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product
With one of these in the top:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6817993002
I easily have ten drives, and each is cooled by 120mm fans. Very nice setup.
-Then take the money I just saved you on a CPU, and put that money towards an Unraid License. Unraid is exactly what you want, and its what I use.
Unraid is a perfect mix of JBOD and RAID 4/5. You get one drive parity for your machine just like RAID4/5- if one disk dies you can replace it and not lose data. But unlike RAID 5 Unraid DOES NOT stripe the data- you can still pull the drives out independently and read them on another system. So if more than one drive dies you just lose whats on the drive.
Unlike real RAID Unraid DOES allow you to mix and match any type of drives you want- on my newest box I have drives from four different vendors (of different sizes!) working great together. you state you want this ability, and Unraid is the only decent way to get it.
Like real RAID Unraid allows you to pool the data- so single large directories (called "User Shares") that span disks for simplicity. With Unraid you don't need $300 RAID cards- the ports on the mobo work just fine plus the one card I linked above.
Unraid is based on Slackware Linux, and I must say its SMB speeds out of the box are amazing. It can stream a Blu Ray via SAMBA better than I ever could coming from a vanilla Ubuntu install. It works perfectly with XBMC.
Unraid runs off a pen drive, so all your sata ports go to HDs. It's a really smart media server OS.
The downsides to Unraid? There are two: writing to the server is slower than writing to individual drives, and it costs money. The writing problem makes sense as it keeps up with the parity as you add stuff to the server (its about half as slow), and if you need fast writes you can make one drive a dedicated cache drive which gets the speed back up. As for the money, you were looking at a i7 when you need a celeron so something tells me you got the $ for a Pro key.
Unraid is not a good solution if you want a box that multitasks (aka BE the media player, download torrents, etc), but if you want a pure media server there is no solution better on the planet:
http://www.lime-technology.com/
If you decide to go Unraid, scrap the CPU and mobo and pick something off the recommended list:
http://www.lime-technology.com/wiki/inde...ed_to_Work
Honestly I don't like PCIx. The Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 I linked above gives you 8 drives off a PCI Express slot. Since any mobo has at least four sata ports, you will be set for 12 drives then! You rather have 12 drives? Then get an Antec 900:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product
Plus three of the above linked Cooler Master 4 in 3s. You want more? My newest build (since my 10 drive Unraid server is full) is based on an Antec 1200:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product
I am building for 16 drives in that one.