[John Reynolds]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136012

Just ordered one. Considering these puppies went for almost $300 at launch, $165 was too hard to resist (assuming that rebate, good until Friday, comes in). Yes, yes, I'm well aware of the price delta between these and other, much larger, SATA drives, but just wanted to post this in case others have been jonesing for a Raptor and balked at that $250+ price for a 150GB drive.

[Malo]

Yep, that's what I got mine for from newegg when I built my system recently. Worth the extra imo, faster than my WD SATA2 500Gb. Everyone has their opinions about these drives however, and they're entitled to them. Was still $60 more than my 500Gb though

[digitalwanderer]

10k rpm? Sweet!

[John Reynolds]

I actually ordered this for my upgrade to Vista Ultimate 64-bit. Didn't feel like backing up all the data and game patches/save files and wifely stuff on my current system, so this way I'll slowly move things over from one spinning disk to the next and I won't have to format my existing drive right away for the upgrade. I dread reinstalling all the games, which, between what I test with at SimHQ and what I play, is a looong list.

[SugarCoat]

not to be a party crasher but you could buy the OEMs for $200 or below for quite awhile after rebates. Still arent worth it in my opinion.

[Maintank]

I use these as my boot drive, and my NAS for storage. Though i am thinking about getting a 2nd hard drive as I am finding with todays games, 74GB just isnt enough hehe.

Once you go 10k, you cant go back. Everything feels so sluggish on a 7200 rpm drive. Hard to explain without witnessing it first hand.

[Skrying]

Have you tried any recent 7200RPM drives, from say Hitachi?

[John Reynolds]

Originally Posted by Maintank

Once you go 10k, you cant go back. Everything feels so sluggish on a 7200 rpm drive. Hard to explain without witnessing it first hand.

I know what you mean. I used to say the exact same thing when I was running SCSI drives with Millenium and Windows 2000. Even the response and feel of the OS after a clean boot seems different with high-end drives.

[Rys]

I've got a pair of 150s, but I don't boot from them. They're my scratch space (RAID0), so I put Windows' pagefile on, Photoshop's temp dir, WinRAR's temp extraction dir, my build output directories and anything else that's IO-bound on there.

They're so fast like that and do so much good for basic Windows performance it's not even funny.

I boot from and store my data on 3 other 7200rpm disks, two of which I'll change soon to Caviar SE16 750GBs

[nutball]

*shrugs* well I "upgraded" from a Raptor 150 to a WD 500GB 7.2k drive and to be honest the overall performance difference didn't seem that great in general use. Whilst the Raptor was nice and fast when I first installed Windows on it, a year or so of Windows bit-rot soon did for it. The new Windows install on my new drive is equally fast, if not faster.

Does that mean that my new drive is faster than the old one on a fresh install? That I can't answer, but IMO the quirks of Windows are far more important than the performance of the drive in general overall interactive usage.

[Geo]

$165? Maybe that means it's time for the next ver to arrive. I have one for my boot drive, but I've got a Seagate 7200.10 like everyone else for the heavy duty storage.

[ERP]

Originally Posted by nutball

*shrugs* well I "upgraded" from a Raptor 150 to a WD 500GB 7.2k drive and to be honest the overall performance difference didn't seem that great in general use. Whilst the Raptor was nice and fast when I first installed Windows on it, a year or so of Windows bit-rot soon did for it. The new Windows install on my new drive is equally fast, if not faster.

Does that mean that my new drive is faster than the old one on a fresh install? That I can't answer, but IMO the quirks of Windows are far more important than the performance of the drive in general overall interactive usage.

I went from a pair of 80 Gig raptors running raid 0 to a pair of Seagate 7200rpm drives running raid 0. Frankly with the exception of compiling work projects where the seagates are marginally slower, I can't really tell the difference.

And the Seagates are much quieter.

[Natoma]

Originally Posted by John Reynolds

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136012

Just ordered one. Considering these puppies went for almost $300 at launch, $165 was too hard to resist (assuming that rebate, good until Friday, comes in). Yes, yes, I'm well aware of the price delta between these and other, much larger, SATA drives, but just wanted to post this in case others have been jonesing for a Raptor and balked at that $250+ price for a 150GB drive.

The 1TB Hitachi drive is roughly the same speed (faster in some tests, slower in others), has a ton more storage, and only costs an extra $120. Plus it runs much more quietly and cooler.

Start here: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2949&p=5

[John Reynolds]

http://www.storagereview.com/php/ben...bench_sort.php

The Hitachi loses in every test I looked up in that database, and gets crushed in the random access read times by the Raptor.

[Natoma]

Originally Posted by John Reynolds

http://www.storagereview.com/php/ben...bench_sort.php

The Hitachi loses in every test I looked up in that database, and gets crushed in the random access read times by the Raptor.

Eh? The only Hitachi's I see are the 400GB, 250GB, 147GB, 74GB, and 300GB. No 1TB.

Hell, I only see the 36GB and 74GB Raptors on those tests as well.

[John Reynolds]

Just check the performance database.

Though after writing my last post, I hit the actual review here: http://www.storagereview.com/HDS721010KLA330.sr

And in single-user usage, it's faster than the Raptor according to their testing.

[Natoma]

And I'm assuming that you will be a single user.

[John Reynolds]

Originally Posted by Natoma

And I'm assuming that you will be a single user.

Naturally. Unless you want to come over and sit on my lap while we surf gay midget porn together.

I'm still happy with the Raptor purchase. That Hitachi is a full $200 more, though its higher capacity is great for those who'll use it and it's nice to see the Raptor's performance position being challenged. My year-old XP install on a 150GB Raptor still has over 30GB of free space, and that's with dozens of apps installed.

[Natoma]

Originally Posted by John Reynolds

Naturally. Unless you want to come over and sit on my lap while we surf gay midget porn together.

Originally Posted by John Reynolds

I'm still happy with the Raptor purchase. That Hitachi is a full $200 more, though its higher capacity is great for those who'll use it and it's nice to see the Raptor's performance position being challenged. My year-old XP install on a 150GB Raptor still has over 30GB of free space, and that's with dozens of apps installed.

I got my drive for $285. That's only $120 more than the raptor.

Froogle is your friend. http://www.google.com/products?q=hit...w=dd&scoring=p

[John Reynolds]

You're determined to make me regret my purchase, aren't you.

[Albuquerque]

For the performance, storage and pricetag, I wouldn't even blink at the Raptor with the 7K1000 on the market. Niiiiiiiiiice....

Found a place selling them for $263 in the states, albeit out of stock at this moment.

[Natoma]

Originally Posted by John Reynolds

You're determined to make me regret my purchase, aren't you.

15 Day return is your friend.

[John Reynolds]

Originally Posted by Natoma

15 Day return is your friend.

I believe it's 30 days.

Hate you.

[ShaidarHaran]

For those of us too impatient to purchase online, Best Buy has the X model (windowed version) for $199.

[Davros]

Originally Posted by John Reynolds

You're determined to make me regret my purchase, aren't you.

No but we will make you regret this quote:

Originally Posted by John Reynolds

Naturally. Unless you want to come over and sit on my lap while we surf gay midget porn together

ps: is that an open invitation