i have done this before. I would strongly recommend enterprise grade sata drives. you pay a bit extra but they are designed to be run in raid arrays.
also depending on how much space you need. you might want to check out nexenta. it's a pretty sweet nas OS if your needs are below 12-13TB. It's solaris based so it uses ZFS as it's file system so you don't really need a hardware raid card since ZFS uses drive pooling.
As for cases there are basically 3 brands i would consider in presented in order from most polished to the least.
Supermicro
Chenbro
Norco
The advantage with supermicro (and some chenbro) is they use SAS/SATA backplanes so if you decide to get a hardware SATA/SAS card then your only using 1 cable to connect all your drives.
eg: Supermicro 846 series case while expensive has a 24 drive capacity connected by 1 SAS cable instead of 24 sata cables.
__________________ and now for something completely different
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