Actually I've owned a bagillion 7200 drives, a raptor, 15K SCSI's, and a 7200rpm with 16mb sata.
Truthfully, the raptors don't preform for their price. You can buy a 36g raptor for just as much as a 250g 16mb cache sata, which overall i think does a better job. The SCSIs blow them all away, obveously, but those are $300+. Why pay for almost 10% of the space for a raptor when you can get one of these new satas?