1.5 Gb/s 10k RPM or 3.0 Gb/s 7.2k RPM?

I'm in the process of figuring out what all is going into my new box, and I'm a bit unsure on the hard drive front. Right now I'm using a Western Digital Raptor X 150GB for my OS drive... I'm really not sure that I'll have the money to be able to buy a new VelociRaptor, so I was wondering whether I'd see better performance carrying my Raptor X over and continuing to use that for my operating system, even with half the bandwidth, or if I would be better off just installing my operating system onto a regular storage drive (~1TB, 3.0Gb/s, 7,200 RPM, etc.)

Or, I mean... if it would really be far and away a better option to go with the VelociRaptor I guess I could just wait until I do have enough to get it, but I don't know how much of a difference it would actually make.

Thanks in advance....

I would get the 1TB drive to store media and large data files and stick with your 150 Raptor for the OS. I have both in my system and they each have their pros and cons.
Save your money for a SSD. The differences between spindle drives are insignificant when you compare them to the amazing speed of a SSD. Plus you can get a great unit now for $200-300!

The interface speed will never be the bottle neck unless you have a ton of them in RAID. FYI.

1.5 vs 3Gb/s doesn't matter in the least.
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Cheers, thanks for the info. As far as I can tell, that interface is the only real difference between the Raptor and the VelociRaptor... so going from one to the other, with neither in an array, I wouldn't notice a hint of difference? (edit: nevermind... after a bit of research I see that there are other factors such as platter density, etc. that make the velociraptor perform better even in a single-drive configuration.)

As for the SSD, yeah... I was kicking around the idea of a 30GB or 80GB drive solely for booting Windows 7, but... I'm not really sure that I'm comfortable with the technology yet. It seems like there's a fair amount of upkeep involved... tweaking, drive degradation, and from what I hear these drives have limited writes? That's a huge factor for me, if it's just going to "expire" out of the blue one day. These WD drives might be slower, but at least I can expect them to (within reason) keep trucking.

IMO Mechanical harddrives have a higher failure rate than an SSD. And I think the theoretical lifespan was something like if you transfered like 10 gigabytes a day it would still last for 10 years. I don't think lifespan is a large problem for them now, although the tweaking and such i don't know about.

Win7 pretty much takes care of all the tweaking for you. It will disable things like Defrag on SSDs, and if you use the default MS drivers with the latest (pulled, soon to be re-released) firmware the G2 will use TRIM to maintain the deleted space on the drive. As for longevity, I think it can handle writing like 20GB a day for 5 years straight. TRIM should also result in less write amplification for a longer life too.

Even fully degraded, a G2's random performance is like 20x better than a VelociRaptor's.

Personally, I'd get a cheap high-density drive (the WD 640 Black is good) which is just a hair slower than a VR for a fraction of the price, or spend a little more (i.e. higher $/GB cost) and go SSD. I don't have firsthand experience with the Raptors, but everything I've read puts them right in the middle of two major goals - the SSDs are a lot faster and regular HDDs are a lot cheaper. A VR will cost quite a bit and still not be as fast as SSD. The G2 is a little slower in sequential writes, but is massively faster in sequential reads and random read/writes. Check out the Crystal Disk Mark thread.