Are there other benefits you get from doing this other than holding the keys to your coins?
Better privacy since almost all SPV wallet simply send list of address to certain server in order to get list of transaction. That means server owner could know those addresses belong to same address if they perform logging. If you perform some kind of data analysis, you can avoid third-party API.
In my opinion, not an experienced one, use a Linux system and a Raid 10 drive system.
I don't see necessity of RAID 10 unless redundancy and read/write speed is very important.