StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I'm curerntly looking to buy a new SATA hard drive, to replace my old PATA Maxtor one, which is going to my Dad. I've got about a hundered pounds to spend, and I want speed over everything else.
The choices I think I have are:
Get a single 74GB Raptor for £110.

Or:
Grab two SATA WD 120GB Caviars, and configure them as RAID 0, also for about £100.

Data security isn't a huge issue here, all meaningful data is stored on a fileserver, so one of the drives cacking itself would only be inconvinient, not destructive.

Which of these two would offer the best performance?

Thanks.

The Raptor will still have lower access times and the goodness of NCQ. The RAID configuration will have higher sustained read times. What you want depends on what you do.

The 74GB Raptor does not use NCQ, apparently:
I got this from WD Support:

The SATA 74 gig Raptor uses TCQ, not NCQ and is the fastest drive IF the motherboard supports TCQ. Faster than our other SATA II drives. We have released a 150 gig Raptor now. It uses NCQ (on the one intended for RAID) and has 16 MB of cache.

However, this drive will be waaay out of my budget.

The drives will be used for Operating System and Application installations, as well as Gaming, if that makes too much of a difference.

Thanks

Dan

My guess would be on the Raptor.

Thanks for the advice so far - I need to try to come to a decision this evening, so any more opinions would be appreciated.

Thanks again.

Dan

I have two 160GB Seagate SATA drives in RAID 0, and I'm very happy with them. I was contemplating getting a Raptor, but I decided on a compromise between storage size and speed. SiSoft Sandra benchmarks the drive at 93MB/s, and I think the Raptor is somewhere in the neighborhood of 72MB/s. However, this array has a slower seek time than a Raptor. The Raptor will probably boot up your OS faster, but if you're going be moving large chunks of data on a regular basis, the RAID 0 will probably be more beneficial.

Ordered

Item: Western Digital WD1200JS Caviar SE 120GB 7200RPM SATA2/300 8MB Cache - OEM
Qty: 2
Cost: £45.34

Now just to wait!