New Hard drive question

the velociraptor is pushing 3 yrs already newer 7200 drives almost match it specially the samsung f3 an w.d. 640 gig

yeah, there's no point in buying velociraptors now. 7200 drives from the latest generation have matched and even surpassed the velociraptors in most benchmarks, and have none of the drawbacks the velociraptors had. If WD were to make new ones that significantly out do what current 7200s are capable of, I'd take another look at the product line. I don't think they will though since they will be so costly for a modest performance gain. In the enthusiast market, SSDs are shaping up to be the future for high performance, low capacity storage. Velociraptors need to go extinct.

I'd highly recommend using several WD Caviar Blacks. I've got the best bang-for-my-buck out of 2 WD6401AALS hard drives in RAID 0, less than $150 shipped and you'll have a blazing 1.2Tb setup. I love my new SSD but the performance increase is barely worth the added expense plus it wouldn't be enough space for you without being outrageously expensive...