[photon]

Yeah I went to 16GB when I started running a couple of virtual machines at once when I did some kinds of development, most people don't do that, so 16GB should be well over enough.

Good choice on the Plextor if you can get that, that's basically right at the top I think currently. It's what I would buy if I was building right now.

I've got 240MB and I really don't feel constricted for app or game installs, 512GB would be huge. RAID 10 for the data drive might be overkill, I've only got 1 2GB Hitachi for my primary data drive and it's hardly full, and I offload documents and media onto a NAS (stuff that I'll likely want to access from multiple computers and media players), and do some drive redundancy from there (as well as online offsite backups).

All this stuff generates noise and heat, the stuff I have on my data drive the speed isn't going to be noticeable at all (images, movies, music, etc). About the only thing I have on there that could benefit from speed is some virtual machines but they already run fast enough that I've never felt the need.

And that's something you can bump up later if you really want to as well. Or start with mirroring if you want some redundancy (just keep in mind that that's not a really good option for data safety by itself). The motherboard should do the RAID for you.

I agree about liquid cooling, it seems to be louder than the best air coolers and I'm really picky about noise, and only really necessary for the craziest of stuff.

I got a blu-ray player only and to be honest I haven't touched it. For data storage everything is either online, or in the rarest of cases USB key. For movie playback I hardly ever use it, I can honestly see my next computer not having such a drive at all.

The Intel 520 is a good drive as well, uses the SandForce chipset so performs pretty well and Intel has good quality and warranty. Probably not quite as fast as the Plextor but still good (though compressible writes are probably faster on the Intel). The Samsung 830 is another good choice.

I've got one of those Direct II CU cards (570GTX) and it's one of the few coolers I am almost happy with (usually I rip off the coolers and replace them). Hopefully those will do as well. Just make sure you can actually fit both on that motherboard, they're huge, search to see if someone else has done it.