Or Raptors....but damn are they pricey. :\

This.

For a boot drive, I'd honestly recommend getting a SSD though.
I got a low-end one about a year ago to try it out and my computer's boot speed skyrocketed. The key thing was that it never dropped. Until of course the drive failed. I didn't lose anything relevant because I only had OS, applications and games on it. Remember that SSDs also don't lose performance due to being "full".

I went for a low-end Kingston one, 128GB. Paid about ~120 pounds for it at a time I think. My brother has two SSDs (high-end ones, don't know the brand names right now), one of 60GB and one of 120GB I think, for for OS and applications respectively. His computer loads, writes and boots like a wonder. You can obviously use regular SSDs for storage. If you've got some money to set aside, buy a decent mid-high range SSD and you won't regret it.

Oh and my SSD failing, that had something to do with me incorrectly installing my new processor. Oh meh, I can still send it back to OEM.

about ssd as boot drives.

i heard differently. Don't put SSD as a boot drive. you get faster booting speed.

and thats not quite a big deal is it? saving 2-5 minutes a day?

instead of use your ssd solely for programs and games, instead of wasting valuable space on windows.

I am just saying what someone else said :)

I had good experiences with Western Digital, Seagate hard drivers. IBM (now Hitachi) drives are just BAD...

It does more than just improving the boot time - having Windows installed on an SSD improves the general responsiveness of the whole operating system.
Even a small SSD has enough space to have a few programs installed as well as Windows, so you can install the programs you use most often on the SSD and put everything else on a larger and cheaper HDD.

5 minutes saved each day for a year adds up to more than a full days worth of time saved by the end of the year. Probably insignificant, but still worth considering.

So nobody knows about the Spinpoint F3 1.5 TB ones?

They were wrong SSD as boot drive speeds everything up infact it's now considered the best upgrade for most modern systems over and above RAM and new GPU something like a 10-20% increase in overall responsiveness

An SSD works just fine as a boot drive. It is just expensive and wasteful as a boot drive.

I don't really care how long it takes my computer to boot. I boot at most once a day. SSD boots faster? Big deal.

I don't like spending $4 a gigabyte, or whatever the going rate for good SSD media is at the moment, for system restore points, uninstallers, temporary folders, browser cache, or the worthless pagefile.

I don't care a rat's droppings how long it takes any Windows component to run. I don't use any of them interactively, except on servers, and my servers run mostly unattended.

I do care, and I care a lot, about how long it takes applications to start up and load their resources. I do care about Wireshark or gcc or emacs coming up in a hurry. I do care about loading screens and loading pauses in games.

So SSD for read-only or read-mostly things that have to load fast while I'm waiting to get something done. Ordinary media for Windows, A/V data, and everything else.

It's not just boots faster it does EVERYTHING quicker. OS resposiveness is a lot more than just boot times. So dont stick them on a seperate drive like most sane people do On windows practically everything is accessing a windows component unless your using XP of course which isn't recommended on SSD's anyway since it does alot of wasteful drive rewrites which are avoided in 7 oh so your a *nix user your still wrong but for other reasons but we were talking windows so I wont bother with them now look them up yourself you'll still find they're recommended as the best upgrade and as a system drive

While we're on the subject of hard drives, does anyone know if Western Digital's ultraportable models are reliable? I'm done buying physical media when it comes to movies/TV shows, and that means making most of my purchases from iTunes or a similar digital media store. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn't currently back up your TV/movie purchases, and I would like to keep my HD Walking Dead safe.

I don't much like the preassembled portable drives, which consist of a hard drive of a type I didn't specify, an enclosure I didn't specify, and software I didn't want :) That includes Western Digital; though as they go, they are probably the second least annoying (LaCie is the best).

Instead, I get something like this:

WD Scorpio Black 750GB
Vantec NexStar 3 USB 2.0/eSATA

Takes about 2 minutes to put them together.