I still say that one case with multiple drives looks better than one case with a slew of external drives connected... So I stand by my "ugly" comment above :x...
My response on case/mobo was saying that you're likely better off buying a
motherboard which supports an amount of devices that you "may" upgrade to in the future; and a case which would fit in with it.
An example, I have a case with 6 hd bays, and 4 large bays; and a
motherboard with 6 sata2 slots and an ide channel. So I can have a total of 8 devices hooked up internally without having to buy another card, so that means that I can have several hard disks on board without having to worry about what I'll have available when I want to upgrade.
Though with the price of drives now adays it's a lot easier to migrate to hugely large disk arrays... I'd love to get 4 of the new 2tb green drives in a 8tb array...