I just initialized a 74GB Raptor on my PC that I have had sitting around for some time (primarily just to test it and make sure it was OK).
Oddly enough, in tests it is about 20 MB/sec slower than the 2.5" Hitachi I have as the system's boot drive.
WTF?
I thought 10K drives were fast.

Erm, your talking bout 11 years old HW !!

Dunno what you used for testing, but in real life the 2.5" will probraly reach better seek times (much more important than throughput) just by being smaller.

Add a better/bigger cache and you get the picture.

Even on througput the "bigger" 2.5" will have the advantage. If it runs at 5400rpm and has twice the data per track it would allready beat that old 10000rpm clunker.

>>Erm, your talking bout 11 years old HW !!

Uh, yeah.
All our hardware is about that old.
But from now on, I'm sticking to 3.5" SATAII drives that can be jumpered down to SATAI and 2.5 SATA drives.
Better/larger cache size, higher data rates.
10K Raptors definitely suck.