Well, I put a LOT of work into the computers over a 3 day vacation.  Nothing like a relaxing day of pulling your hair out. 

 
FreeNAS was the one easy thing to install.  It actually takes longer plugging in a card than it does to install FreeNAS and it's just a couple minutes to make the drives accessible to windows.  As I've mentioned in the past, FreeNAS is nice enough to take over as the master server if you tell it, so if the network connection is up, any computer on your home network can see it...none of that bullshit windows networking often does.  I've modified a crappy case I got for free so instead of holding three 5.25 drives, a floppy and a single 3.5inch drive...it holds up to SEVEN 3.5inch drives.  Should make for a nice RAID box (one for boot and up to two, 3 drive RAID arrays).  I'm not entirely satisfied with the 120 megabit throughput of the system, I might need to try another motherboard since it seems the VIA chipset (no surprise) kinda holds back the hard drive transfers.  No biggie, again...it's quick and easy to install.  I'm hoping to get it up to about 200-250 megabits (about enough to burn 12X DVDs straight off the network drive)

My computer got it's new drive...I moved everything over, old drive pulled.  Everything seems to work just fine.

My Wife's machine was another story entirely.  First off, because of an old emergency setup, hers has TWO of the 250gig drives that I'd intended to make my 500gig RAID array with.  I finally got off my ass and yanked ONE of the drives out.  The OTHER drive will be replaced with my old drive...once she's burned off a shitload of data she's been accumulating.   BUT, the big thing is that I found out there was some corruption occurring on her machine.  Turns out it was two different things causing small problems...an error in one bit in every 10+ meg, but still way too much.  I've since transferred 20gigs of data without an error.

My father's computer is yet another story.  I won't go into much detail but, the motherboard has two PCI slots, four SATA connectors and one PATA connector.  His OLD computer needed TWO PATA, one SATA and one PCI.  Unfortunately the onboard sound at the last minute..did one of those "Hey, you didn't install the driver properly so the only way I'll ever work is by reinstalling the OS" so I needed a sound card (that's both PCI now) and ...oh, what's this, another PATA.  Hmmm, well I'm just giving him a damn sound card I had laying around and swapping a 250gig SATA for a 250gig PATA drive.  Yay, all is right with the world again...more or less.  Oh, also one of the PCI slot requirements is because of a wireless card I got him.  It should prevent MOST of the lightning strike problems he's had in the past (rural cable lines aren't grounded as well)