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It's no secret that case modding is a practise finely balanced between form and function. One type of product that attempts both is the current trend of coloured and rounded IDE, floppy and SCSI cables. PCCG sent over a couple for me to check out - one IDE and one floppy. The main drawcard of these particular units is that they're cheap - a quick look around shows them cheaper than other coloured/rounded cables, in fact only slightly more expensive than some places are selling normal beige ribbon ATA-100 cables.
The form part is clear - there's nothing more drab than a beige ribbon cable inside your tricked-out case. These come in red, black or blue and are a thin rounded shape which adds a more high-tech look to your PC's innards.
The function part is slightly more tricky. The main advantage is in terms of airflow - while in most cases I doubt switching from ribbon cables to rounded ones is going to make a dramatic difference to temperature, it's much easier to direct airflow without slabs of plastic in the way. Also, there's much less chance of a rounded cable causing fan starvation than a flat one that ends up across the intake.
There's no performance increase, of course. In fact, I've heard it said that rounded cables can slow down your IDE drive access, by causing crosstalk and burst errors. Maybe if you do it yourself (there's a guide here) and damage the shielding, then that might be true - but my HDD (a quite speedy 7200rpm IBM ATA-100 unit) performed identically in HDTach with the new cable and a flat-ribbon ATA-100 that came with the motherboard. No, I didn't bother benchmarking the floppy drive. :)
The only problem I noted was the way the broader sleeve section, near the connectors, tends to lift away from the connector when the cable is bent too tightly, revealing the cable strands beneath. You can push it back up to some extent, but it will still not quite be perfectly flush - if it were, you would lose a lot of the flexibility of this kind of cable. If the cable is not too tightly bent then this isn't an issue.
That's another useful aspect of a rounded cable - it's much easier to snake through the innards of your PC than a flat ribbon which needs to be folded and tucked inside other ribbons. You can also flip the connectors around easily as the cables allow a lot more longditudinal twist. I found them much easier to use in the sometimes-difficult Yeong-Yang Cube case of my main desktop machine and the normal miditower LAN box:
There's not a lot more to be said - you already know if you want these or not. If they're just the finishing touch your modded case needs, you can grab them from PCCaseGear.com who are based in Melbourne.