Just looking at these :

Western Digital 300GB VelociRaptor 10000RPM SATA-300 16MB 3.5" Hard Drive

Seagate 500GB MomentusXT Hybrid SATA-300 2.5" 7200RPM 32MB

Anyone come across them before ?  Any good do you think ?

Edit : Oops just noticed that Seagate is for laptops.. sorry.

Snowcrash has the VelociRaptor, they are a bit faster than normal 7500rpm drives, but they aren't that big, 300GB after formatting will be about 275GB available to windows.

If I was after speed, and I am really then the VelociRaptor is about the best there is in HDD terms, but if its space you need a descent 1 TB drive would keep you going for a long time.

You could always keep the old drive for space and have the new VelociRaptor for speed, put Windows on it and in another partition your games, then loading times should be about as good as they get with an HDD.

I have a 150GB WD velociraptor and they're good but not amazing. Your WEI score doesn't go up though  >
175MB files move in a blink i.e. you don't see the file transfer window.
I use it for my win7 / games drive as it helps with boot and load times.
The amount they cost you are very close to smaller SSDs.

Any SATA drive (inc 2.5" drives) have the same connectors so other than physically mounting the drive a 2.5" is no problem.

Thanks fellas

I looked at some reviews of the Hybrid drive and they were pretty average, a few people said it was the best thing since Shakin' Stevens but you always get that.  Mostly it was nothing to write home about.  New technology I guess, takes time to perfect...

But I am happy with the actual speed of my PC at the moment.  I think I should probably go for the Samsung 1TB for £42.00 rather than the raptor at £130 ish.

I did look at some cheaper SSDs.  There's this one, but I can't justify the price :

http://www.dabs.com/products/ocz-technology-120gb-vertex-2-series-sata-300-3-5--solid-state-drive-75J6.html?refs=4294948431-42730000

I'd rather save £130 and wait the extra 10-15 seconds lol