I purchased an Intel X18 SSD because it was 1.8" to replace my 4200rpm in my Sony TZ170 for a little performance kick and obviously it will give me HUGE performance over that drive. But I had to test compared to my 2x300gb Velociraptors in RAID-0... HDTach had the raptors hit 453MB/S compared to the SSD hitting 252MB/S on an Asus Motherboards Integrated RAID. I understand there are faster SSDs out there and HDTach only did Sequential Read Test but i'll take the Raptors any day, Windows and games load incredibly fast with both drives. It depends on the Rig your building and its purposes as each make sense to different people with different needs, The Velociraptor i have is fairly quiet but obviously significantly louder than the SSD and less power but Gamers dont really give a rats behind about that. Just my 2 cents! i love me a pair of Velociraptors!
(just for comparison, i had 3x72gb in RAID-0 of the original Raptors and they would hit 336MB/S in the same benchmark)

My Raptor is absolutely crucified by my Gf's WD 640GB Black HDD. Ok it's only the 75GB model but the difference is huge.

Makes it look like a 40GB HDD from 2004.

I'd rather buy a fast (7200) 1GB HDD nowadays. Density is king!

The Raptor line is now just a novelty really. As for the heatsinks? Well my current Raptor is just 6 months old as it was a warranty replacement for my red hot three year old one. But this new one hardly gets warm. Boutique hard drives.

Why would you blow your money on 1.2 TB of high speed storage when most of that space will be used for media like video, music, and games? I would rather have 128 GB of ultra-high speed storage for the OS and applications, then some cheap mass storage for media.

The purpose of high-speed storage is to speed up workflow, to make the computer more responsive and snappier. It's not going to have any effect on media like videos or mp3s.

Let's see. I could spend $660 for 1.2 TBs in a RAID 0, running at great speeds with a pair of Raptors, or for the same price, I can get a single 256GB SSD.

Until SSDs drop into realistic prices, most people aren't going buy them. Average Joe walking into a B&M and seeing a 2TB Western Digital sitting next to a 128 GB SSD. One's $150, the other is $300. Which one will Joe buy?

Its not just the throughput and capacity that counts, but the latency. The lower the latency, the faster the drives will 'feel' during normal use.

The transfer speeds of the newer WD 'Black' drives are probably not far behind the raptors, but trust me, the raptors feel much more responsive (I 2 of the 300GB models).