Case : Cooler Master Centurion 5 Black/Blue ATX - link PSU : Rosewill RP600V2-S-SL 600W - link Motherboard : ECS Elitegroup A780GM-A ATX (Radeon onboard video) - link CPU : AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane 2.6 - link RAM : 2 Gig OCZ Reaper HPC Edition DDR2 800 (PC6400) dual channel - link OS HD : Seagate Barracuda 250 Gig SATA 3.0 Gig/7200 - link Archive HD : Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1 TB HD / 7200 / 32 MB - link Burner : Asus 20X DVD+/-R - link
Not too sure about the motherboard. I would have prefered an Asus or Intel, but obviously Intel boards are not available for AMD CPUs and the reviews of Asus boards for AMD along with their price and feature set didn't really inspire me. Normally I don't like to take risks with motherboards, but apparently ECS is the 4th largest manufacturer in the world and makes OEM boards for IBM and Compaq. Anyway, the feature set on that board cannot be beat (5 SATA ports + eSATA), and since I am using this as a fileserver, the onboard Radeon video is a plus (saves money). Radeon is not something that typically entices Linux users but since X won't even be running on this system, it is more than adequate. If the system is repurposed later, a better card (Nvidia) can be put in the PCI Express slot as needed. This particular board has gotten some really good reviews. The only people who don't like it are overclockers, but since I don't overclock, I don't care.
Phoronix mentions its compatibility with Linux in this review. This is important, because likely this machine will run Debian. I may wind up putting Gentoo on it since the irritation of compiling it will be minimized by the fairly beefy system specs. Gentoo just wasn't happening on my PII/400 with 256 MB of RAM.
As for the TB hard drive, while I have had really good experience with Western Digital and Seagate, the reviews of their terabyte offerings have not been very good. Hitachi beat them to market and the sense I get is they rushed their terabyte models out the door. Hitachi's reviews have been excellent, however. I have never used a Hitachi drive before, so I am going on the basis of the review of this specific model. I initially wanted a WD or ST, but, again, the reviews were not inspiring.