Western Digital's VelociRaptor VR200M hard drive
 

Every time WD has released a new Raptor, the performance bar for desktop hard drives has been raised. But the new 600GB VelociRaptor VR200M enters a market teeming with SSDs whose split-millisecond access times blunt its previously formidable spindle speed advantage. Can the new Raptor keep up?

http://techreport.com/articles.x/18712

I don't know why they are even creating new velociraptors. Their added performance aren't worth the extra costs and putting two 3,5" HDD in RAID would probably give better results. Even a single SSD combined with a normal disk would be a better choice.

here's why :)

Intel Postville 80Gb €200
WD Caviar Black 1TB €100
1,08TB of storage and incredible performance for €300, only €50 more as a Velociraptor 600Gb ...

3x WD Caviar Black 1TB in RAID €300
3Tb of storage and maybe even better performance

1x Velociraptor 600Gb €250

RAID 0 on HDDs for data? No thanks

80gb for OS and Apps on a fast disk and then the rest is slow storage? possible, but not the same as 600gb on "fast" storage

4x Western Digital Caviar Black 500Gb in RAID0+1 €200
That's 1TB fast and safe storage. It's cheap and not efficient, but it works.

Or
3x Western Digital Caviar Black 500Gb in RAID5 €150
Highpoint RocketRAID 2300 €120
Still 1TB of storage, fast and safe at only €270
If you have a good onboard RAID controller, you can even drop the Highpoint card :)

Now that I'm thinking of it, the Velociraptor is a lot more compact, only two cables to connect. In compact computer this would be great, but most compact computer don't have a lot of computing power or they are supposed to be quiet (eg. HTPC).

consumer level RAID is never "safe storage", especially using onboard raid on motherboards; I would not recommend RAID0+1;
either use external RAID card and RAID 5 as you suggest; but than we're talking data storage. for a workstation fast access reigns supreme; which is where SSD dominate!

I would never consider buying a VelociRaptor drive, even if it spun 15k rpm and was 2tb in size; it's too noisy and slower in random IO compared to SSD.