panda-wanker get yourself a MS in COMP SCI and try again, hosehead. Striping is much more effective for speed than a 25% faster spin rate, and 2 SATA 150GBs can be had for a lot less than this...
I don't think having an MS in COMP SCI proves anything. (And tossing around that you have one doesn't look any better.) I have a CS degree and I know the people that took those courses. (Not all of them were geniuses, that's for sure.) I know plenty of people that didn't and are smart as well.
I'm going to add a little more information to this subject. Don't want to get into a flame war or anything.
Anyhow, while you are correct about striping being effective, that is mainly for sequential reads of data. There are draw backs as well:
1) The raptor will have faster seek times. (Random access of small data should be faster.) You can't decrease the seek time via striping. I believe this is the main benefit you should be looking at if you are looking at the raptor. This mainly will benefit loading of programs. (Such as during boot.)
2) With striping if you lose one drive, you basically lose two drives worth of data. Losing a terabyte of data would suck. You could use RAID 10 (striping & mirroing together), but then you're looking at 4 drives. Not a big deal if you don't plan on using the two drives for data I suppose.
3) I believe two 7200 drives would use more power than one raptor. Although the difference is probably negligible and will never be made up given the huge cost increase of the raptor.
4) More space taken up by two drives. Some people just don't have the room.
All in all, though, you have a valid point that RAID should be considered over this. I'd also consider a RAID 1 with read spreading support myself. Better to have the drives mirrored than striped in my opinion. Although I think you'd probably need a more expensive raid controller to spread the reads. You also don't get twice the write performance, but most of the time read is more important.
There are a lot of variables here. I wouldn't go with a single raptor or striping myself as I've learned over the years it's better to mirror drives and not have to deal with the hassle of losing data, trying to recover it, and just having to reinstall every single thing. My next boot drive setup will probably include two drives in RAID 1 with a higher end card to can spread reads across the two. I don't like the idea of the noisier raptor and lower disk space I'd get with that method.
