Hey Craig,
You know I'm NOT the alpha geek around here, so I'll just offer a couple thoughts based on my own similar experience.
I think that fanless Gigabyte card looks pretty cool. I have a similar, lower end one and it works like a champ.
I don't know how concerned you are about silence, but having the video card be fanless can't hurt. My impression (albeit with smaller drives) is that Western Digital drives are significantly noisier than similar models from Seagate and Samsung.
Does your motherboard have a coaxial audio output?
Fun project!
