Now that I've lived with my first self-built computer for a number of months now, I think I've gotten a good feel for what I've done right, and where I could improve on future builds.
I think the combined SSD boot disk and traditional HDD storage drive is the optimal solution- Small, fast SSD's are getting cheaper and more mainstream, and the performance benefits they confer to startup speed and loading times is nothing short of awesome. For everything else, a large traditional HDD is great, since the speed differential for accessing something like a picture or a music file is negligible, and huge capacity hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper- a 1TB drive is probably more storage than I'll ever even need, and those are going for sub $100 prices.
Regarding gaming, the single video card more than holds its own against everything I've thrown at it so far, save for an odd texture bug with foliage in a game that brought it down to about 7 FPS... Since tweaking the texture settings in the game popped it back up to an average of about 40 FPS with no apparent degradation in visual quality, I'm going to rule that one to be a software issue. Of course, the siren song of dual cards is always strong, so I don't think I'll rule it out entirely as an option on future builds- obviously this will be determined by budget.
The only real area I believe I made a bit of a misstep in would be the case. I was very concerned about getting a small case, and I think that may have been a less than optimal choice in my situation. Make no mistake, the case I have is great, but the small size of it meant a whole lot of hassle and a few concessions made to get everything packed inside. Upon further consideration, I don't really move my PC around a lot, so the size of it really is not an issue- once it gets put somewhere it tends to stay there for a given period of time and not move until the desk moves, or I move out of said living arrangements. Since a larger case opens up more cooling options and makes wire management a bit easier, I see no reason not to go ahead and get a larger case next time around.
All in all, I'd say this was a pretty successful build.
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