Re the new 10K Raptor SATA drives.
Do they really make a noticable difference in overall system response vs the more afforable 7200 RPM ATA drives… or not?
What’re you using 'em for?
I doubt that the casual PC user would notice a difference, but somebody doing high-powered scientific computation or graphics stuff might.
As far as gaming, you won’t notice much of a difference.
In HD-heavy applications (like video editing, or working with large 2D files), you’ll notice a speed improvement.
Here is Tom’s Hardware’s review of the Digital Raptor (36gb)… it gets some pretty impressive scores, beating out a 10K RPM SCSI drive in many apps. However, for the average user, in my opinion, the performance advantages aren’t worth the drop in capacity and the humongous increase in price.
Stick with a Seagate 7200.7 drive… they have excellent performance, huge capacity, and don’t cost an arm and a leg.
Well, if you need speed, capacity, and a sane price, Maxtor has a 300GB drive with a 16 MB cache (as opposed to the normal 8 or 2 MB ones) for about $210.