if you are going to be spending that much on a hard drive already then why not go SSD? i mean if you are going to spend that much, and you can clearly see from what everybody has said on these forums, an SSD is clearly superior to any 10k rpm drive. here is a cheap 30g one on newegg with a read time of up to 155MB/sec and write of up to 90MB/sec. it has low write times but almost all SSD's do and we don't ever write anything on it. we only want them for the read speeds.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227372

if you want about the same performance as the intel X25-E then get 2 of the above and put them in a RAID 0 configuration. i read somewhere on these forums (not sure if it is true, would have to do a little more reserch to be positive) that you can get about 250MB/sec read times or higher and something like 170MB/sec write times. again i am not sure if that is true so don't take my word on it but i remeber reading it somewhere on this forum.

6g should be fine for a little while but i would consider upgrading to 12g as soon as you can afford to.

havent read much about the mb you selected but i have herd and read on alot of well know tech sites a lot of good things about the Rampage II.

don't think i have anything else to add, gald you finaly got the funds up for your new system and w/e you go with i hope you like it! ^_^

~YYF

PS
maybe Silencer can drop by and shed a little light on the HDD vs SSD and RAID delema, i would also sudgest reading his review of the SSD's vs 10k rpm raptors (OCZ Core 64GB MLC SSD Review.. (Testing in progress..)) if you havent already. it may be a little out of date on prices but the info in there is invaluable for us boxers.

hope this helps some! ^_^

~YYF