Is a 10,000 or 15,000 RPM hard drive worth the extra cost?

Don't bother, get a Seagate 7200.10 or Western Digital SE16 hard drive. They are the fastest 7200RPM hard drives and are a far better value over the Raptors.

SCSI drives are a pain in the ass to deal with, so no..

The high-rpm hard drives would have much better seek times. But simply having the drives spin faster is only one metric of what makes a hard drive fast. There is also the logic in the firmware, the buffer cache... and that's just on the hardware side.

Western Digital's made some 10k-rpm SATA drives, but it didn't take hitachi long to be able to make a hard drive with significantly more space and a faster overall throughput because of better (internal) software.

I would suggest a pair of Hitachi's and set them up in RAID 0 if you want improved throughput, which is the performance metric you're much more likely to see a difference when it comes to real-world use. Seek times are only going to matter significantly if you're doing a lot of file searching, so they'd actually be pretty solid for a web server or a file server seeing a lot of activity.

There's also the issue of thermals... faster-rpm drives generate A LOT more heat and a significantly higher amount of noise. Those WD Raptors sure as hell screech like the **** raptors in Jurassic Park. But even with these, two of those in a RAID 0 just can't match the sheer throughput of what a pair of any quality SATA (or even SATA II) hard drives in the same RAID would do.

Short answer: No

Long answer: HEEELLL NO, are you out of your mind?

I have heard that those high RPM speed drives perform better. But it also depends on the bus type and cache. A brand new installation of Win XP would take about 30-40 min on a 7200 drive, while it takes about 10 min on a scsi. Scsi hardware is expensive as well. You be the judge.GRiMeY

SCSI is not only overly expensive (something like ten times as costly) it also suffers from a dearth of hardware. For the cost of a 50GB SCSI drive you are looking at a FIVE HUNDRED GB SATA drive.

Just wait for solid state hard drives to arrive... they will fly to a insane degree!daytona_178

They are already out, have been for a while. Suffice to say that they only top out at 8 GB's of storage right now and even the 8 GB ones are about 400 dollars US (492 CAD on TigerDirect.ca)

I have one and I recommend it in terms of speed, but not in terms of price. I like it for video editing and general OS navigation, but I would in no way endorse anyone else to get it, for the money I spent on it I could have gotten a 500GB RAID setup. But I already have it and I like it, so oh well.

Also, it is not that loud. I have some 7200 RPM drives that grind away much worse.

Almost it is used for expensive servers or workstations. For gamer, RAID is a good ideal.

Don't ever get a single raptor. 27200.10's in stripe raid will beat a single raptor every time.

if u really want those 10 second boot times, then get two 36.7 raptors and put them in raid 0. they will act like a 74 gb drive and load video games, thier maps, and operating systems faster than anything a 7200 rpm drive could touch. but then u have to have another drive for storage.

but, for normal proformance, just put two 7200 rpm drives in a stripe array and then u can skip the storage drive business.

I would suggest just getting two 250gb es 7200.10 barracudas and puting them in raid 0. the es drives are meant to be used in raid arrays and they will proform better.

Don't ever get a single raptor. 2 7200.10's in stripe raid will beat a single raptor every time.

if u really want those 10 second boot times, then get two 36.7 raptors and put them in raid 0. they will act like a 74 gb drive and load video games, thier maps, and operating systems faster than anything a 7200 rpm drive could touch. but then u have to have another drive for storage.

but, for normal proformance, just put two 7200 rpm drives in a stripe array and then u can skip the storage drive business.

I would suggest just getting two 250gb es 7200.10 barracudas and puting them in raid 0. the es drives are meant to be used in raid arrays and they will proform better.

ImSpartacus811