7200rpm, 10krpm. 3gb/s 1.5gb/s ?????? Help

[FourTwenny]

Ok so i am looking at hard drives. My plan is one super fast hd for windows and games, one decently fast hd for music/movies. I thought this would be an easy one, i thought a few hours of reading and i would know all, I thought wrong.

To start i am just getting one hd to game with, and still going to use my old pc to download. So i thought simple, western digital raptor. It spins at 10k/sec Verses most others at 7200 or even some 5400. As i continued to read on though i realized that the raptor has a max 1500 mb/s transfer rate on sata where a seagate baracudda that spins at 7200 has a 3000mb/sec transfer rate. I also read something about maximum External data transfer rate. So confused.

Are a lot of these numbers insignificant when i turn on half life 2 or am i going to be yelling at a loading screen? Is 7200rpm with a 3 g/s transfer rate faster than a 10,000rpm with a 1.5g/s transfer rate.

The size of the hd means nothing to me ( well my os hd anyways ) so can anyone tell me what to look for and what numbers actually matter when it is showtime. My motherboard is the Evga 680i ( S-ATA and IDE PATA hook ups.)

 

[Nukem]

get 2 of theses and it'll bneat out the performance of a single raptor, and have all kinds of room.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148144

 

[saltynay]

Is the 320gb seagate barracuda 7200.10 one of the fastest mid sized hdd's then???

Matt

 

[Trifid]

Once everything (and I mean everything) in your PC can't be upgraded any further than get a Raptor. Until then I will not recommended them.

The 3Gb/s only benefit the user for burst speeds. HD don't maintain the 1.5 from SATA I.

Now for HDTACH:
2 74GB raptors in RAID0:

I think this is 2x 250GB Seagate drives in RAID0

Single 36GB raptor:

Single 74GB Raptor:

Basically these show the raptors having faster access times for reading lots of small files where as a large file would be faster on a RAID array or a single larger hard drive (just). Go for what you want but as I said I think they are a waste of money.