Building and Outfitting A Great Development Workstation for Windows with a Tight Budget: A good article on building a development workstation on a budget.
“I don’t believe in SCSI drives for developer workstations. Rarely will you be disk-bound in performance, especially with huge RAM and large disk caches. The dollar premium that SCSI extracts makes sense on servers, but workstations? I don’t see it.”
The deal he mentions on Visual C++ at the end is pretty incredible.