Upgrade my ST3200822A seagate barracuda?

Howdy there folks!

I've been thinking about doing an upgrade on my hard drive recently. I figure it will be one of the last upgrades I can manage before I'm forced to a PCI Express board, as I'm still with AGP (The Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard) for the time being.

As the topic states, I've got a ST3200822A Seagate Barracuda hard drive, it is roughly, two-three years old now. Since I like to game, a lot, I was wondering what hard drive out there that doesn't go above the S-ATA 150 interface would be a large upgrade? (My current hard drive's specs here,
http://www.superwarehouse.com/Seag [...] /ps/461442

Currently I have my eye on the Raptor X by Western Digital
http://www.superwarehouse.com/West [...] /p/1497047

But I would like to know if there is anything in the S-ATA 150 (or lower) bracket that is better than the Raptor X.

And if I do upgrade from my current hard drive, would I see any sort of performance boost in games? I once had a friend (and I'm not sure if said friend knew what they were talking about) that my hard drive was causing a bottleneck in my computer's overall performance.

Here's my computer's current specs
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe Motherboard
Intel 3.4GHZ Northwood with Hyper-Threading
Radeon X800 XT PE
4x Corsair 512mb TwinX XMS ram DDR400 (Total 2gig)
Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card
Seagate ST3200822A 200gig hard drive

You likely won't see much of a performance boost in game frames per second, but it might load up levels quicker. It will also load up Windows and other applications quicker. But it's sure not the first thing I'd do to try to speed up gaming. In fact, it's one of the last things I'd invest in to improve gaming speed. You'll notice when you look at the different charts on TomsHardware that the Hard Drive Chart is the only one that doesn't have a gaming portion. That should tell you something about the value of a faster hard drive when it comes to games.

You'd get much better bang/buck to upgrade your video card, but that would be investing into something that will be thrown away (or sold with, for a fraction of what you paid) your computer when you upgrade to a PCI-Express based system. But you probably knew that already. If you wait for the ATI 3850 to come out, it should be much less than the Raptor drive you're looking at.

And the Raptor is the fastest desktop hard drive, although some of the new big drives (like 1TB drives) are coming close. But they can't touch it when it comes to access time, just in data transfer rates.

Clint

BTW, the link you posted for the Raptor is overpriced by about $100, compared to NewEgg. And the only difference between the Raptor X 150GB and the Raptor 150GB drive is the funky window on it. So unless you like watching your computer work (through a window on your case, or with the cover off), the extra bucks are wasted.

Clint

stick with the old maxtor's they still kick ass as far as i am concerned i have 2 sata/300's and they rock.

hi do you still have that hard drive ? I just fried mine and want one for spares