Interpreting Hard Drive benchmarks

The result you got from HD Tune only gives you sequential read speed, they are only useful for gauging speed of large file transfers. The easiest way to get actual desktop pattern performance results is to use PCMark Vantage's HDD tests, those will give you what you'll actually experience under typical usage.

Generally as said above, Speed in megabytes are only needed for sequential transfers or reading files that are perfectly fragment free

The access times are actually more important for most people as those are how fast the drive can get(Move the read/write heads) from one place to another. So even if you have a 90mb/ sec transfer if the head has to move to 30 spots you will loose time doing that. This can leave the raptor ahead.

The degree of performance will vary with what you are doing. A drive with faster access times(raptor) will work much faster when reading files that are fragmented, but if you can get all of your files most commonly used near the start(fast) of the drive and have little to no fragments you will get to take advantage of higher throughput.

There are times when the hard drive is NOT the bottleneck. Some games that use heavy compression for meshes/textures may actually tax the cpu enough to cause it to not be able to accept data as fast as the drive can give it. This is why some apps get no real boost in load times from a faster drive or better access times.

Last off, burst rates, they are a joke. Since a drives buffer is small (16-64MB) they will never hold enough data to be useful IMO.

I would almost say to use the new drive only because its newer and should last longer. If you do you can maximize performance by partitioning it to only what you need. This keeps all data on the start(fast) section on the drive and the section with the lowest(good) access times.

A short stroked raid volume better acess times, still, no raptor

The full volume. With windows and all the good in the first 500 gigs i get good speeds and fairly good access times

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Some info on short stroking can be found here
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2157.html
Partitioning gives near the same results and is more easy. It does not waste space, the rest of the drive can still be used just without the advantage when its used at the same time as the main partition is working.

I hope this helps to clear it up a bit