I've been building my own computers for the last 5-6 years and one of the constants I always see is people recommending getting a small capacity 10,000RPM HDD as your 'main' OS drive. I've always avoided doing so as the cost was quite a bit of a step up, but my latest soon-to-be-machine is high end. So the obvious question is: is it really worth it to spend the extra money to do so? For comparison I was looking at either of these (both on Newegg):

$139 1tb Seagate 7200RPM 32mb Cache
$279 300gb Western Digital 10,000RPM 16mb Cache

If it matters - I'll be running Vista 64-bit with 4gb RAM

Why not grab the 74gb 10krpm drive and once thats filled up move to a larger slower drive for anything thats not an application.

Go with 74 should be enough for os and applications. In my case at least.

So I'd just want OS and apps on the 10,000? Not games? That was my main worry, since games are 10-20gb in size now.

Not sure how many games you play, I dont play many at the same time.

You could go raid, and order a few terrabyte drives

Assuming that's the velociraptor and not just a raptor, then yes its worth it.

Yes, the velociraptor. Ok, I'm going to go ahead and spring for it then. The 74g is $139 and the 150g is $179 so I think I'll spend the extra $40 there. Thanks, guys!

It comes down to personal preference, I have had a Raptor drive and got rid of it. For me I found no difference between a raptor and a raid array in day to day performance. The raptor "Might" have loaded up Battlefield servers slightly quicker.

What I did find that I couldn't deal with was; The rapter was louder, hotter and generally felt like I spent a ton of money extra for something that irritated me more then it benefited me. Now the Velociraptor I have not used, so I am unsure if it is more of the same.

I'm pretty sure I've read that 10k rpm hd's break down more often as well.

But again, like Tivia said, its a personal preference thing...You may not notice a difference at all between the 10k and the 7200, really only a small percentage of people out there do see the difference.

I'm pretty sure the Velociraptor only comes in 300 GB.. Those other sizes are probably straight raptors.

And like id love to see any articles you have read on the matter. We have over 100 Raptors, and currently 25 velociraptors, and are about to order another 100 Velociraptors. if people are experiencing issues id love to read about them.

My personal experience is just the opposite. We ship ours all around the world and have had not a single issues with either the raptors or the velociraptors.

our TB drives on the other hand have close to a 10% failure rate but we are extremely tough on our demo systems.

As Tivia said, they are louder than a normal 7200 rpm drive. and the raptors run hotter than a 7200 RPM drive. The Velociraptors are a tad quieter and much cooler though.

are you giving the random interdweeb benefit of the doubt that his random experience has data backing it up?

ps

I'm trying to come up with new words and see if they stick.

Aidden,

The 150g is also a velociraptor, but the 74g is not. I'm glad you mentioned it though 'cause I wasn't paying any attention at all.. for some reason I thought they were all velociraptors. The 10% failure rate on the tb is kinda scary though ... I was thinking of picking one up as well to use as my video/music storage drive. Of course, they are fairly cheap and Christmas is right around the corner..

I've got a 74gb raptor, had it for 3.5 years now. I can count the numbers of times my PC has been turned off on ... well, both hands. I've moved quite a few times >_< I turn it off for thunderstorms (the really, really bad ones), and when I move. Otherwise, it's pretty much always on.

It's been a champ. 0 issues. Well, besides Vista + Office 2007 + Vanguard = entire hard drive. Be careful with a small drive (even tho 74gb doesn't SEEM small, by god it is).