WD must have been reading this thread and responded quickly:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/company/releases/PressRelease.asp?release={5ABC5B81-92EE-470F-8FAE-A2191EB887F4}

read the preliminary reviews on that. i think 7200.11 is still better. most of us don't require that speed demon, we need capacity! plus, it's still not TWICE as fast as the larger capacity perpendicular drives.

what gives me hope is that @120MB/s, you can put 2 of those together in raid0 and get around 558GB of 1080p 4:2:2 uncompressed! all u need is a laptop and that's pretty amazing =D. that's close to an hr worth of 1080p! =D.

I wouldn't rely on any Raptor to be a solid performer for pushing out content (remember the Seagate and Hitachi TB drives have twice the on-board cache which makes a huge difference) but this new Raptor might make an excellent boot/OS drive.

Numbers from the new drive, note that they are using an engineering sample...

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the...ard_drive_ever

According to Bare Feats, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 outperforms the .11 and costs less too!

The VelociRaptor is really interesting with its 2.5"+heatsink form, but the fact that I can't use it in my FirmTek enclosure breaks the deal for me. I don't understand why they couldn't design it with the SATA connectors in the standard place.

Yes, that is what the raptor drives have always for me been good for was boot/os drives. The cost per GB was simply too high and the performance really was unneeded. But then again, I am not running uncompressed. I still would at this point since I have used both on my edit systems use the Seagates. As the other person stated, they are extremely high performing in raids and the Cache is very high which leads to a great editing experience for two and three drive raids.