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I'm thinking over time we're going to see a lot less internal drives too, with m.2 being so small and it plugs right into the motherboard kinda like RAM. Even some small itx cases have 2 m.2 slots and as those drives get more affordable we'll need less cables and less extra drives and stuff. You can get a 1 TB M.2 SATA drive for under $300 now. I really like that idea, less clutter inside and that should mean better air flow too if you worry about heat. We're not quite there yet, but I think in the next few years they'll get much cheaper as bigger and better drives come out. I'm tempted to go with that 1TB drive for my build, still a bit too pricey but maybe if I get a good xmas bonus...

 daedalus wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Small cases are nice if you need to fit them somewhere like a HTPC, but I always go with big cases for expandability. Big coolers take up space, extra hard drives, some high end video cards are very long and a bigger motherboard for the extra PCI slots.

So, I get wanting (some) space for cooling and video card clearance, but serious question on "expandability": Why? Your motherboard has built-in audio, network, hard drive controllers, usb controllers, maybe some firewire and possibly even wifi. What do you have to expand upon? This isn't the 90s anymore where you needed to buy separate peripheral cards. And hard drive have enough capacity that you really don't need more than maybe two unless you're doing some kind of custom RAID setup, and I can fit three hard drives into my micro-atx case. Four if all of them are SSD.

I was mostly thinking hard drives (my computer currently has 5 + optical drive + SSD), TV cards, enough space for a 2nd GPU if you want to go to SLI/Crossfire, sound cards (you often want a sound card a few slots away from the video card/s to avoid interference).

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against SFF computers, it's just every time I think "oh that would be nice" and just end up going for a big case instead and I haven't regretted it yet, somehow I always manage to fill space.

That said I've never been a case nerd. As long as it's quiet I couldn't give a feth what holds my components. Once it's built I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my case, lol.