New Home PC / Developer Rig

In honor of Windows 7, and my increasing frustration with my 4 year old DELL computer, I figured I would pony up and build myself a nice developer rig. Even though it is my home computer my typical usage is work related; Visual Studio(s), SQL Server, IIS, Virtual Machines, etc... My wife's typical usage is email and web browsing. We are not gamers at all; not even solitaire! The most graphic intense application I use would be Google Earth.

I was initially thinking RAID 0 15K rpm SAS drives with the new ASUS MB, but that bumped my cost up way too much. Plus, the performance benefit of RAID 0 doesn't outway the issue of losing one drive loses all data factor. So I decided to go with a single 300GB 10K RPM SATA drive. I don't need much in the way of disk space since all music, video, doc's, etc... are sitting on a file server (that needs to be upgraded).

The last PC I made was about 7 years ago. It was a beast of a machine with Dual SCSI CD drives and a DVD drive. Does one really need more than one optical drive these days? I don't remember the last time I needed to duplicate a disc.

Here is what my initial thoughts are. Starred rows are the upgraded components that I am not sure are worth it for my usage. This doesn't include monitors, which I desperately need, but will be holding off on.

Any comments would be appreciated. I want to get this project rolling ASAP!