Recommendation for storage system hardware (mainboard, controllers)

For a NAS system I'm going to build for a photographer¹ I'm
looking for a mainboard, that provides at least four PCI-Express
4x slots for SATA2 or SAS controllers. CPU Socket may be either
940 (AMD Opteron) or 775 (Intel Core 2). There shall be no fancy
OnBoard stuff, like multimedia hardware.

No need for PCI slots, though having one (but not more) may come
handy for POST-80 diagnosis.

Ideally the board has IEEE1394 (FireWire) connectors, to connect
external HDDs used for backup.

On the storage side I want to use Linux Software RAID, since this
makes the system independent of a hardware vendor's RAID
solution and is more flexible to configure. So what I need are
SATA2 or SAS controllers, that provide very good I/O throughput,
but hardware RAID functionality is not needed. Of course they
should be Hot Plug capable (the swapping works in my experience
quite well in the Linux software RAID) and are well supported by
Linux.

And then of course the harddisks, for which I need of course
reliable ones (ideally 750GB capacity or more).

Network connection is of course by GBit ethernet. I'm thinking of
a Intel 4x NIC which can be connection bonded easyly. Good idea?

What can you recommend: Mainboard, Controller, HDDs, NIC?

¹ the guy currently has about 3TiB of image data on several
external HDDs (the IEEE1394 ones, that shall be used for
backup), and wants some central storage, that appears like a
harddisk on his Macs. But he has no idea of how to administrate
computer systems, so any of the storage systems you can buy of
the shelf, but need extra configuration on both the server and
client side are a No-Go. This should become a PnP solution: just
connect the thing into the network, boot it up and let the NAS
appear on the MacOS X desktop using Avahi protocoll. And any PnP
solution you can buy (or which I know) can't deal with the
amount of data (the largest PnP NAS I've seen provides 4TB max,
but the guy wants to extend up to 10TB in the near future). And
none of the NAS solutions I know about, provides backup through
external HDD functionality.

Wolfgang Draxinger
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