I'm looking at this type of setup more and more having recently installed Shogun2 and discovered looong load times again. I can't even imagine what I'll be looking at when Skyrim finally gets installed. Maybe I go with a raided SSD set for the gaming bootup and keep my everything-else bootup on good old fashion long living platters.

The benchmark for a system build used to be just gaming. These days it's gaming for GPU and related performance hardware plus virtual machines for general hardware like storage drives, cpu cores and ram quantity.

For backups on the Apple side; get a timecapsule (nas/wifi router) and let the time machine backup software do it's thing hourly. On win7, a NAS and win7's own backup software does a good job though I think I'm getting conflicts between Diskeeper and the backups. All my machines without diskeeper backup to NAS clean but my one with diskeeper installed keeps giving me failed backups "can not find device" errors.. booo. I need to take some time and look into that fully though.

Every three or so years when the little upgrades just won't cut it and it becomes time to do with triad (mobo/ram/cpu) I'm reminded how much I miss working at the old computer shop where staff paid wholesale. This paying retail puts a heck of a dent in a rig builder's pocket.