If you are trying to do a raid setup on the mobo, it depends on if the mobo has onboard support for raid and sata drives, if yes, you plug the two hdds into the different colour sata ports onthe mobo usualy blue or orange, and when installing win7 and sata drives, make sure ahci is turned on in the bios, but win7 sata drives blow, so use the newest intel ones, just have them on a flash stick.
and i read the first post, not sure if you have a computer yet or not but..
I basicly use mine for the same you will be using yours
After Effects, maya 2009/2010, z-brush, ect..
what i have is, and its cheap now to build...
i7-920 @ 4ghz on true120e, makes sure you get a d0 stepping as they oc the best, but the c0 are fine for 3.7/9
gigabyte x58-extreme (i think they have the UL something now, basically the same without all the cooling bits)
2x3gb kits of of G.skill 1200ram so thats 6x2gb sticks, so you will get some some 3channel ram happening(i started with 6gb and it was fine, but when i began rendering for print, and 1080p and 4k video res's the extra ram helped, but i had to lower my clock speed to 3.7)
cooler master 1000w psu
5x1TB hhds storage and windows
2x60gb ssd one for windows and programs, and one only used as a maya scratch disk
blu-ray drive, $120, but you dont really need that, but backing up 25gb a disk beats tons of 8gb dual layers
graphics card dosnt matter for maya as its only doing basic open GL rendering in real time, unless you have an extremely heavy scene and then you would need somthing like a quadro FX, but i have 2x4870s in crossfire, they are cheap now and good enough for maya.
case, wateva you want, but you want somthing big, i have the cosmos S
all that now from msy, minus the case bluray, ssd's and lots of hdd,s should be around the 1900 mark or less, plus the new 6cores come out next year so you can either wait or buy now, dosnt really matter tho as the i7 socket will be the same so you can always upgrade..
and just so you know how much quicker the i7 is, my old maya rig was e8600@4ghz, 4gb ram, rendered a 300dpi a3 print in 26mins, the i7 stock did it in 8mins, and then 6mins when overclocked.
and you want 2x24s or even 3, i have 2x23s and 1x24, the 24 in the middle 23s on either side, you need multimonitors to speed up the maya work flow, you can have your main window in the middle and then top/side/wateva view on another monitor, same with a huge custom shelf, all depends on what you are doing tho.
good luck, hope that helped.