Tell me what you think.

pparks1 said:

I love my Antec Sonata II's where the drives mount sideways. That's one feature that I actually missed on my latest box where I used a larger Antec P182 case. However, I love my 182 case.

The good things about a sideways drive bay is that it gives more room for cards on the motherboard. In my old case, I had to remove the video card to be able to remove the lower drive bay. When putting it all back together again, there was barely room for the video cards power connector and the cables to the drives. I had to hold my tongue just right to make them fit.

CoolioG said:

I'm still deciding on the PSU. :)

I won't make any specific recommendation, but get the strongest and best one that you can afford. It would also be good to get one that is modular.

pparks1 said:

whs said:

Where is the challenge. It will take years before you can fill up the 30GB SSD with the system (provided the user data is on another disk). Since I am running Win7 on my SSD, I am costantly hovering around 15GB +/- a few.

The challenge is that not everybody is as likely to maintain a clean system as you and I might be. I think that quite a number of people might find it difficult to stay within 30GB. When I got my 80GB Intel, I was really torn on going with another drive to get to 120GB for my C drive. However, by moving my page file, shutting off hibernation, putting my browser cache on my storage drive, setting system restore to 2%...my install and apps plus 2 games (Wolfenstein and Crysis) is averaging right around 23-25GB. So, I'd be a little concerned if I were in a 30GB...but I am pretty comfortable with my 80GB.

Hmm, you got me on the games. I never use any - I have even uninstalled all the games that came with the system. But I have a rather big collection of other substantial programs like Gimp, all kinds of video capture and editing programs, etc. I have no shadowstorage because I use Macrium nearly daily. My 80GB is divided into 2 partitions - half system, half data.
I think keeping the system slim is no rocket science. There is enough guidance around on how to do that. The reason I keep recommending the SSD is that it is so much more fun. I hardly ever use my Vista system any more even though I am a big Vista fan. Only reason is that it is so much slower because it is on the HDD (maybe also because it is a little bulkier). But in April 09 I had Vista on my Vertex and that was fast too.