new built help 10k or 7k rpm

dear forum users

please help me find a best solution for my new built gaming rig. I am not worried about space but i need top notch performance.
Therefore i have selected 2 drives i dont know which one peforms better(help) or suggest a better drive

2 * Raid 0 500gb 7200rpm 32Mb cache - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822148288
Or

single hard drive wd 10000rpm 150gb 16mb cache - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136296

Here is a link to my thread: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] lociraptor

Hi OP

Your real choice is 15K RPM SAS drives (or 2nd hand 15K U320 SCSI drives) vs. 7200 SATA drives (until SSDs hit the right price). 15K SAS or U320 drives will need a controller card (start at around 200 USD) so is not the cheapest option.

e.g.
SAS/SATA Controller:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6816102139
70.00 USD

150Gb 15K SAS drive:
http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sas_hard [...] 3147RC.asp
235.00 USD

So quite a lot more than the Raptor (double the price by my reckoning). You can find better deals for HDs on Ebay, etc. of course (I didn't try too hard). If you can't afford SAS then go for the SATA drives you were originally suggesting.

Also folk are offloading U320 SCSI drives these days. I recently picked up a second hand 150Gb U320 15K drive for about 100 USD (equivalent in GBP) on Ebay.

10K rpm drives offer only a minor improvement over modern 7,200 rpm drives. In days gone by I always built machines for other people with Raptors if they had the budget... This is no longer the best way to eek out top notch performance.

Bob

No one here bothered to check the links except me. The link for the "WD 10000 RPM 16 MB" hard drive is the new 150 GB velociraptor, not the old raptor. Rofl. Clearly, if he's looking at getting the 150GB velociraptor, there must be some sort of budget restriction. SCSI is out the the question.

I too am curious to know how the smaller velociraptor would perform versus it's larger brother.

No actually the Velociraptor is a goer (my bad I had checked the links but had forgotten the performance advantage). It matches a lot of 15K 2.5" drives. The access time is really low and the high ariel density overcomes the inate disadvantage of the 2.5" platter size (150Gb/platter).

My original comment stands about it not beating modern 3.5" 15K SAS drives. However it would appear to beat the 3.5" 1TB 7200 RPM Samsung F1 by a wide enough margin to consider it as a boot drive (the Windows XP startup performance is v. good).

Bob