Im starting a business that involves creating Custom computer cases. I too am a gamer, and would like your feedback on what things (5 1/2 bays, fan controls...) to put into cases. You guys are my biggest target group, so the more info you give the better I can serve my customers.

My first advice to you as a businessperson is this: Pick a new target market and do your research somewhere else. Maybe an actual gaming site, not a game developer site.

We didn't get a custom case for our standalone server, it came with it. The rest are rackmount, so unless you're going to be manufacturing custom racks..

What am I looking for? A few good fans that are quiet, cable management that doesn't hinder ease of access, and built-in UPS so the servers stay running. There should be easy access to the hot-swappable hard drives and hot-swappable fans, as well.

Custom computer cases are about 1 and only 1 thing: style. Sure there are all the things like bays & fan controls, but #1 is visual style. That's a veeeery subjective market.

But you'd want to buy some market reports from somewhere and do an evaluation of the current custom case market. See which companies are doing well, analyze their products & identify the salient features that indicate success. No idea where you could buy those reports but i'm sure they're available somewhere for a hefty fee.

-me

I wish I could find another company closer to me that does true custom cases, most the ones I fount were just ones they buy and fix up. And as for Custom Server racks, I can design em as long as I get specs for what size racks you have going in and all that. And remeber I'm not targeting only gamers, I also do high profromance systems.

All I need is a case with more 3.25" bays than the mind can comfortably conceive. I think the largest case market is people who want a computer case that actually looks like a computer case (no windows, stupid blue lights, etc) that all of their computer fits in.
I'd pay lots of money for a case I can fit a useful number of hard drives in - in these days of IO-bound operations, I use a 12 drive raid array on my primary machine, but I have to use some eSATA because I can't buy a case that can take that number of drives. The case doesn't need to be particularly big to take that many drives - there's enough space in my current case, but there's no way to mount them.

While most "home users" for computers (the people that don't need 10k+ systems) normally do only want normal boxes, there area lot of gamers, companies, and people that just want "cool" looking computers that are willing to spend the money.

As with your case problem, I can design/mod a case to fix alot of hdd bays, worse would be taking 2 older cases (full or double tower) and putting them togeather and setting up a hot swap style system to put the hard drives in. One product I'm designing that you may like are desks with the computer system designed to fit into the desk so all you see is the input/output items (monitor, Cd roms, mouse...) which I could design a set up with it to hold 100 hard drives (I am guessing on that number right now). If you would like me to try to eather design a case or a mod to do for you PM me or e-mail me and I'd be gland to talk about it more.

You need to go back to the drawing board with your business methods. Successful people already know what the customer wants. Study your target market, view the competitors products, and give your customer more for less at equal or greater quality and service.