Outside the fun of building your own. I cant see a reasonable reason not to go with a major PC manufacturer these days and just spend the extra $200 to max out the warranty on them. Abuse the hell out of it and get a new one every 4-5 years when the contract is up.

In all honesty there was prolly nothing wrong with your computer to begin with. If you had a power outage and on post the Hard Drive was no longer seen there's a good chance all that needed to be done was clear the NVRAM and perform an automatic IDE detection and let the system reacquire whats attached to it. Your power supply will blow out 1000 times before anything else will if you truely had a power surge. That and what youve told us so far about your experience to me conferms that your getting milked.