What replacement startup drive for Early 2008 Mac Pro?

[netdog]

I hear that the Raptors are fast but noisy. As I am a noise freak, what other drives would you guys recommend? I could probably get away with a 74GB or 80GB drive.

Also, how much of an improvement can I expect over the existing Caviar that has 8MB of cache?

 

[aibo]

The current Raptor (150GB) is pretty much EOL by now. It's lost its speed advantage to the modern high-capacity, perpendicular-recording 7200 rpm drives. It was last updated in early 2006, so it's long overdue for an update. It's not slow by any means, but I'd expect a 32MB cache 300GB version in the coming months.

 

[Trishul]

i am exactly the same, need speed but am a complete noise freak (a few seconds faster rendering isnt worth me getting distracted by noise).. having owned raptors before i know how noisy they can be.. so this time i went for Samsung Spinpoint F1 drives.. one as a system drive, and 2 more in a RAID 0 set, i don't know if the raid is any faster, more for convenience really. But i'm finding the F1 as system drive to be excellent, it's really FAST, very quiet (I have 3 of them and i haven't been bothered once), and it's a 1TB drive. Highly Recommended!!

check out the benchmarks at tom's hardware, this drive is faster than the raptor for everything except Server/Database actions... and yes there is an imminent raptor update so wait for that, in time being get some 1TB action going.

 

[ekwipt]

Raptor for the boot, larger 32 mg cache drives for everything else?

http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/barracuda/

"We have two very strong drives that have unique strengths and weaknesses. Is the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 fast enough to be used as our OS/Page File/Game/App drive? Although the Seagate is incredibly fast, as a general usage OS drive we still feel that the Raptor will be the quickest out of the two. This is based solely on sheer access time and latency of random read I/O's. On the other hand, a video/graphic editing station and anyone with a tendency to work with large files would be much better off using the Seagate. In this category, the Seagate fully dominates the Raptor in all aspects. Drive throughput on the Barracuda is phenomenal. Someone holding off for Solid State Technology pricing to drop may still consider picking up a combination of these two drives. Using the Raptor as your boot drive, and purchasing a Seagate 7200.11 in a 750GB or 1TB capacity for your DATA drive. There was some fierce competition at hand today, and we love it!"