Getting ready to build. Why is the feedback on the WD Caviar SE 16 750 so positive and its little brother the 500 gets criticized (noisey, runs hot, slow). I wanted to buy two 500's for RAID. Now I hesitate. Maybe two RAPTOR 75's and one 750. How can there be such a difference? Is there such a difference? The goal being speed and performance of course (games and video). Thanks.

well, games and video editing are going to benefit in two almost completely different ways when it comes to hdd performance. games (and most applications even), will benefit from faster random access times a lot more than they will from increased STRs many times. large files such as when editing movies (i assume thats what you mean), will benefit from the increased STRs (such as with raid 0) more than they will the faster random access times (its one big file instead of many smaller files).

if you have the budget, you could possibly go with 2 raptors in raid 0 (theres the 36, 74 and 150 ADFDs available), and that will provide both the faster random access times that most applications benefit from, and the higher STRs that raid 0 provides for larger files, such as multi GB movies even. between all 3 ADFD raptors, the STRs arent going to differ by any noticable amount, since they all use the same sized 74GB platters and 16MB caches even.

the larger 750GB could be used for backup storage if you wanted then too.

The 750 gig has the feature of Perpendicular Magnetic Reocrding which is the best performance and low noise for 7200rpm hard drives. the 500 gig does not. AKA games/apps will load faster while using less power and lower noise. But the raptors are 10K rpm but do not have PMR.

If you can justify the price get raptors but if you have loads of games/apps that will exceed 150 or 300 gigs then get PMR.

Excellant. I thank both of you.