I have a corsair 350D and I wish I had the patience to build something smaller. I saw a ton of small cases at dreamhack that looked cool as hell.
You don't need patience, just a change in how you look at your computer, I used to HATE small cases, no room to work in them. However the loss of DVD roms made me realize something, a lot of the space in my computers was taken up by the drive bays, which I was using less and less often. It drives me nuts seeing all these new, massive cases being released with tons of drive bays, that few use anymore. Luckily this way of thinking is changing, but slowly.
So I did this.
This has a raid ssd* tucked under the graphics card and a dual 120mm water cooling system. I paid $29 for the case, it had a full mesh front (with filter). I only left the upper drive cage to hide wires (non-modular power supply at the time this was taken), the rest of the drive cage was removed for video card and radiator clearance.
As you can see, it's very easy to work in, there's no wires running everywhere in the way and everything stays cool. To remove the cage, I drilled out 3 rivets. For the radiator, I did cut part of the front, but it took like 10 minutes with a Dremel and drilled two more mounting holes (the case was meant for a single 120mm fan). I spend 30 seconds hiding wires (it's good enough). It runs cool, I can overclock just fine, and it's the easiest case I've owned to work on, especially the easiest watercooled. Ignore the fans, they were what I had laying around and since this sits in the basement on a shelf, I don't care, they were quiet, decent flow and available for free.
Storage? While I could easily bolt a drive to the bottom of my case, I use a file server. It too sits inside an identical MATX box, and while it does have the drive cages, it doesn't have a graphics card to get in the way. I prefer the file server simply because I can turn off my high power desktop and still access files on my laptop. I also offload drive imaging (work), backups, downloads, remote access and more to the server, leaving my desktop free. I can rebuild, change OS, or simply turn it off and still have access to all my files. It uses 15-25 watts when idle (never standby), 40-45 when working, compared to my desktop (120 idle, 200 when working, 400 when gaming). I bought the processor, the rest was spare parts, it paid for itself with power savings in less than a year and made things so much easier. I'm going shrink it in half soon and cut the power in half.
* I made my own version of this to hold the drives, eventually buying one when companies started making them.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kingwin-Dual-Bay-PCI-E-HDD-Bracket-For-2-5inch-IDE-SATA-HDD-SSD-KW-PCI2H25-/390853038839?hash=item5b00a812f7:g:YXIAAOxyBvZTQ6is
