First up is my 500gb Seagate 7200.11 SATA drive (storage drive ~50gb of data on it)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822148288



Second 300gb Western Digital Velociraptor (with Vista Installed on it ~68gb of data/programs on it)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136260



Pretty good difference in access time and average transfer rate all around much better performance. Just thought I'd throw that out there for anyone wondering the type of performance you can see with these drives in a non "test" system.

Relevant specs:
Q9450 @ 3.2ghz
Gigabyte GA-x48-DQ6
4bg Corsair Dominator CL4
Vista Ultimate 64bit

Benched with HD Tune 2.55

That depends entirely on the work type. Copying files and so on the raptor will have an advantage however at loading games and so on... Well the computer still needs to process the data so if the CPU can do it quickly enough(mostly older games) sure, the Raptor will have an advantage otherwise the difference will be minimal.

However 2 500gb Seagates cost less than one Raptor so RAID is also an option. Did you use the 16mb or 32mb 500gb Seagate, I see your new egg link says 32mb but just making sure

Edit: Deleted my edit, prices have come down, massive price drops on the Raptors, so 4 drives ain't cheaper anymore...

I do about 50% video/photo editing and 50% gaming. I didn't want to deal with the "unreliability" or "risk" of running in RAID 0 so I wanted a single drive solution. Drive seemed like a good option for me. Still setting my system up so I haven't had a chance to do much real world testing, but I tried out HD Tune to see what types of numbers I could assign to the drives just to ballpark performance difference.

Edit:
I used the 32mb Seagate. Matched the model number up with the newegg model (I bought it at a local store not online)

The 32mb 500mb Seagate has about half the chance of failure of the standard drives if Seagate's stats are to be believed. Been running RAID 0 / 1 for a while now using the same Seagate drives. The RAID 0 partition for my OS and installed apps + RAID 1 for my data. Pretty much reduces the risk to a minimum and its quite zippy.

Edit: Made a small correction. Now off to get some coffee into me.

LOL so you actually trust a single drive?

Apache_Lives..MORE LIKE TROLL_LIVES!!HAHAHAHAHA
I kid I kid. But seriously, raptors in general are pretty effing reliable, OP get a cheap second hdd and back your Sh!t up! if anything, you'll be able to recover from catastrophic infections from whatever it is the interwebz have to offer out there (heck i got a virus from "picture"shop...cough cough)

So a single drive fails, much easier to recover the data off the drive than if a raid array fails.

sciggy, I believe what they are trying to say is to continue using your HDD the way you currently but back it up regularly or run it in raid 1. Raid 1 = mirroring or instantaneous backup. You should not see a noticeable difference in performance but all your data is safe so if you have a catastrophic failure you have a 2nd drive that everything is loaded on.

By the looks of it you have the Seagate 7200.11 and the velociraptor. Use the 7200.11 as your backup drive.

RAID 1 is not backup. No form of RAID replaces backup. Search the forum for "RAID is not backup" for why.

RAID 1 is backup against all forms of possible disk failure. What it does not prevent is corruption of Windows files, or similar data loss, which is in my experience much more common than a physical hard drive failure.

I have run Raid ) on 2 x 74 GB WD Raptors for the past FOUR years with NO issues at all. Just replaced the two drives with ONE VelociRaptor and intend to add a second, soon, for RAID 0 again. The drive Quality of the VelociRaptor and Raptor drives is excellent. There should be NO problem running Raid 0. Even WD techs recommend either the Raptor / VelociRaptor or the new "Black" drives for RAID 0. The five year warranty is WD's way of assuring quality.

The only safe way is to have your main aswell as a seperate external hdd for backup or similar design, raid 1 mirror will mirror corrupted data and virus's etc so thats not the greatest idea, and raid 0 single drives share the same fate when it comes to failure - one drive dies in either setup, you loose your data. Recovery should never be apart of the solution, shouldn't have to even go that far etc.

My setup, well proven for years:

Main - 2x250gb seagates, Raid 0 (intel matrix - also a small raid1 partition)
Backup - Raid5 NAS server, Raid1 NAS server

All the stuff stored on the main (raid0) is meaningless and wont matter incase of drive failure, as its also backed up on the server etc, the gain with Raid0 is worth is.

Its so obvious who hasn't seen the benefits of raid0 or hasn't even used it before.

People dont seem to realise that Raid0 can double the minimum spec of a pc