The very first thing you should do if you want to bolt-together your own hardware out of commodity devices is invest in static control technology. This is ofte

The very first thing you should do if you want to bolt-together your own hardware out of commodity devices is invest in static control technology. This is often not understood by those without experience in electronics manufacturing. Static electricity can cause damage to components that will not surface for months. Because of the nature of the mechanism it is almost impossible to know that static was the culprit when a motherboard, memory or drive fail. In our case, we, among other things, do a lot of hardware manufacturing (as in buy the chips and build our own boards). Because of this we invested in custom conductive flooring and everything else above the floor is also static-aware. For example, all rolling carts and shelves are wired with redundant contacts that touch the floor, thereby making a connection. The above is an extreme for the occasional builder. At a minimum you should setup a working environment that has a conductive surface like an static-dissipative mat and wear a conductive wrist strap connected to the mat as well. There are also ionizers and other tools that would be good investments. Handling components around server racks should never happen without regards for static electricity safety. The rack should be grounded and you should wear a conductive wrist strap connected to the rack. I'll bet that a lot of failures in consumer/commodity builds are due to this very issue and not necessarily connected to bad or questionable components. If you buy components built by reputable manufacturers they will have been manufactured in tightly controlled environments already. Don't break the reliability chain by handling these components in uncontrolled environments.