It's been several years since I have built a custom PC.  About 4-5 years ago, one day, I just quit building and started buying them.  A few weeks ago, I was needing a mass storage unit attached to my network for backup-to-disk operations.  I looked at NAS and SAN solutions but the reviews were terrible on most all NAS solutions and SAN solutions were entirely out of my budget.

A few days of reviewing and poking around the Internet gave me some ideas.  The inherent problem to solve was temperature and write speed.  So, I went to the gaming world for a solution of inexpensive, high cooling, & mass storage computer shown to the left.

I used the Corsair 600T Graphite case.  This is the coolest cases I think I have ever seen.  Corsair did an amazing job in the design of this case in planning for proper cable management.  In fact, I don't think I've ever seen another case before with cable management in mind.







Notice all of the rubber grommets on the back wall of the case?  Those are for feeding your cables to the rear side of the tower so they can be managed properly and out of the way as to not interfere with air flow.  This is a mid-tower that support ATX and Micro ATX form factors.  The case can support a very large power supply as well as the extra long graphics cards that gamers love so much.  It has 4 - 5 1/4 bays for expansion as well as 6 - 3.5" bays for a mass amount of hard drive storage.  The case includes 2 - 200mm case fans as well as 1 - 120mm fan in the rear of the case.  Here is my full parts list:

Tower: Corsair 600T Graphite Series
Power Supply: Corsair 850W Modular ATX
Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth X58 LGA1366
Processor: Intel Core i7-960 3.2GHz
Cooling: Corsair H50 Hydro Series
Memory: Crucial 2GB DDR3 PC3-10600 (x3)
Graphics: ASUS EN8400GS 512mb
Optical: HP 24x DVDRW
OS Drive: 160GB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s
RAID Drives: (4x) Western Digital 2 TB SATA 3.0Gb/s
OS: Windows 7 64bit

That's it ladies and gentlemen.  The cleanest looking machine I've ever built.  Styling and fast.  I reduced my backup time in half compared to the DLT tape system I was using.  This will allow me more opportunities to get creative in my backups and protect the integrity of my company's data.  Feel free to contact me if you have questions or want more details about the build.