Building A Stable NFS Box?

parker9 asks: "I do a lot of numerical computations- typical runs take one or two days (occasionally a week) on dual alpha processors. These boxes (either running Tru64 or Linux) are pretty stripped down- just dual processors, 2Gb ram and tiny hard drives. All the results are dumped to a simple PC running Linux via NFS. We're talking GBs of data in 24 hours. Works fine, since backups are a snap. The problem, however, is that this user disk has been hosed three times since November. Not sure what's going on, since the latest combination of hardware looked pretty good (SCSI Seagate HDs). So, please advise me on what hardware to put together for a stable (24/7) NFS server: motherboard, processor, scsi card, network card, power supply and HD. Is there a flavor of Linux which would be optimal for this type of application?"