Those people that say Raptor's are not a waste of money - do you really have so little time in the world that the few seconds they shave off booting and loading applications are that important to you.
Take aside benchmarking - if you play benchmarks all day then I'll forgive you, you've made the best possible choice with regards IDE so be happy.
If however you use your PC for anything else...
...yes the Raptors are faster.
There is nobody denying this - but when you compare them to the fastest 7200rpm units out there the difference isn't night & day here.
A few seconds here, a few seconds there.
If I honestly thought that you could save an hour, even half an hour in a day by going for such a drive I'd jump on the bandwagon.
However they don't.
So you save a few seconds but at what expense?
They are noiser - come on now, don't say they are nearly silent or they aren't.
Again I'm not describing them as so noisy you won't be able to cope with the noise, but there is an increase is sound.
Then, ultimately you've got capacity...a 7200rpm drive will give you twice the capacity for the same cost.
I won't say the Raptor is a complete waste of money, however at the same time there is nothing major to gain from it - unless those few extra seconds saved each time you launch something from disk (remember you're launching from cache after you've loaded an application for the first time in the day from disk) really are that important.
