New
#31
My belated 2¢:
Performance would depend on your application. The VelociRaptor would have less latency. A 10,000 RPM drive has a 3 ms average rotational latency. For 7200 RPM, it's 4.17 ms. (It's the time for the platter to make 1/2 turn.) The Velociraptor has a quicker mechanism to position its heads, so its seek time would be lower.
On the other hand, the Caviar Black drives have a much higher data density on their platters, so their sustained data read (or write) rates may be better than the Raptor. I suggest the 1.5TB Caviar Black:
Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD1501FASS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
It's $10 cheaper at Newegg than the 150GB Raptor. I have one. I don't find it noisy.
Maybe you'd get some insight by checking the data base at www.storageview.com. A quick glance suggests that you'd be giving up little performance with a Caviar Black as compared to a VelociRaptor.
The WDC 10kRPM drives seem to be a unique technology, but SSDs seem to be what the world is moving to. There's a vast range in data rates (especially write rates) with them, but their 100 microsecond latencies make it hard for traditional drives to compete.