when was that episode on???

I was looking at the prices. They certainly aren't justified in terms of performance, unless you buy a $600 controller and get at least a few drives. That's a lot of money and too expensive for my taste.

To sean,

They unveiled the UGM on August 5, but throughout the whole week they were showcasing the parts that they had chosen.

>> That's a lot of money and too expensive for my taste.

Mine too but if you want *the best*, it is the only way to go.

In my book, the best drives offer a lot of storage space, good transfer rates, and all for a decent price. Raptors, although they are fast, lack in the area people buy hard drives for: storage. For cheaper ($60 ea.), you can get 3 times as much storage (250 GB vs 75 GB) with just a slight performance loss. I'd rather have 750 GB of storage rather than just 150 GB especially when you consider it is about paralleled in performance.

2 x 74 GB Western Digital Raptor (SATA150), $183 = $366 & 148 GB
3 x 250 GB Hitatchi Deskstar (SATA150), $110 = $330 & 750 GB

I wouldn't call the performance parallel. The raptors are about 33% faster than other SATA hard drives, and in raid 0 it's nearly 50% faster. That's a pretty nice jump in performance. Personally I might actually wait for SATA II Raptors to come out before I buy them. I'd rather have 2x Raptors in a Raid 0 and 2x 250GB HDDs Raid 0 than any other combination out there today... You get space and speed.

I have heard that the Raptors get pretty hot. Can anything else be used along with the fans to help cool them off?