Thanks for reply. I'll stay clear of SSD as they're still too costly for my wallet (although I'd love the idea of 4 silent SSDs in my mac). Do bigger HD mean slower HDs if by the same maker/config or is this difference very slight?
I'm staying with mechanical HDD's for a while, will probably move to a hybrid platter/small SSD design in the future cos I reckon that will give the best aspects of both designs when the big drive makers start churning them out in volume.
The Velociraptor despite a 10k rpm drive is 2.5 inch notebook sized with a 3.5 heatsink and runs quieter than my 3.5 drives. I get about 125Mb/sec from that and the nearest any of my other 3.5 inch 7.2k drives manage is 85-90Mb sec so yes it's noticeable. A standard 3.5" 2Tb 7.2k drive costs the same so you're paying that premium for the performance. I use the VR as my XP boot drive and my older WD 150Gb 10K Raptor with twin partitions - one for the paging file and the other for video encoding, then a pair of 'normal' 1tb 7.2k drives for storage that doesn't need the speed.
For another cheap performance boost you can also stick a high speed USB flash drive into one of the rear usb ports and enable readyboost. I use a 4Gb Corsair Flash Voyager in my (soon to be replaced by 7 RTM) MCE Vista box and you notice that too. 7 differs from Vista removing the 4Gb limit and enabling multiple USB drives.
