So, I get home from a friend's wedding in Ilkley, West Yorks, to find that the console on my Linux box is spewing a load of "read failure: hde" messages.

It appears that one of my 250Gb IDE disks has just snuffed it.

Obviously, I could just buy another one (and I'll be canvassing for hard disk opinions at some point). This, of course, is not the way I do things, as you know.

I was planning, at some point, to move to SATA. So, now seems like a good time to think about it.

Currently, my Linux box is an Asus A7V with a 950MHz Athlon Tbird on it. I'm using a Highpoint HTP374 RAID card with Linux (not for the RAID, though).

I'm a bit narked off, because the disk that's died is my /home partition -- just after I decided not to bother backing it up to DVD, because it would take too long.

Fortunately, most of my important stuff is backed up, so it's not quite as traumatic as it could be.

So: assuming that I decide to upgrade to a new PC, can I get advice about the following:

A case -- I want something relatively quiet but, above all, it's gotta be cool.
A motherboard.
A CPU. Should I get an AMD64 or something exciting like that?
Hard disks -- I'm considering going for RAID5 for reliability, and maybe sticking 3 or 4 disks in it, but that means that I'll probably want to opt for SATA -- 'cos PATA is a PITA to cable. This should be kept in mind when thinking about the case.
So, do SATA RAID solutions exist that work with Linux (Debian/unstable)? Are they particularly hard to set up?

Backup. Tape is expensive, but I'm thinking that it might be expensive not to use it. Any thoughts?