I got a 7200rpm drive for my laptop, and its really fast.  Never understood why until I read reviews on the VelociRaptor.  Single platter, and smaller seek area.  So I'm planing a new build, and got the idea of using 7200rpm laptop drives instead of regular drives. On the egg they got 320GB single platter WD drives for around $60, but they also have 120GB 7200rpm laptop drives for around the same price.  I plan on running a RAID5.  I don't need a lot of storage space since I store most of my media on my media server.  So here are the pros and cons that I'm thought of for using laptop drives

Cons

• Less storage space
• Only 8mb cache (as opposed to 16mb)
• Possibly more noise

Pros

• Faster
• Better air flow in my case

I've actually figured out that if you did it right you can fit 4 to 8 laptop drives in a single 5.25" drive bay.  Anyways, what do you guys think?  Should I try it out, or just stick to standard drives?

Sounds like a good idea except the numbers. From what I can tell laptop drives generally run hotter which is one reason that a velociraptor is in a big heatsink. So instead of going 8 drives I think I'd go 4 and put a fan on each one. I don't really like to much light in my case any more. Don't get me wrong a bit is cool but 4 green red blue purple white or multicolors would be a bit much. As small as they are I bet you could grab 2 lite up 80mm and 2 no light 80MM 3-5 laptop drives and raid 5 and have a very fast and cool system. Just make sure all the fans are blowing the right direction :) Oh and you can get laptop drives with higher than 8 cache, 16 mb cache Seagate and WD Hitachi exist I know. Though on the WD it only comes on the 200 and the 320 GB specially named (black diamond or something) drives.

Found this not my favorite online retailer but it's a 320GB 16MB cache Seagate I know the egg has em to Seagate and WD same specs pretty much though I don't know which gets the best reviews

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4167702&csid=ITD&body=MAIN#detailspecs

Did the LED thing for a while, and then almost went to cold Cathoid.  But then me and my X broke up, and now my main rig is in my bedroom.  Those LED's were really annoying when I was trying to sleep.  I don't normally leave it on when I'm sleeping, but everyonce and a while I like to do some video encoding.  I think I'm going to go with the regular drives.  The WD single platters 320GB are $10 cheaper at zzf, and with the added cost of drive bay adapters its cheaper.  I could do a mod, but thats also a lot of time involved.  I think the reason that the velociraptor is in a big heatsink is becasue it runs at 10,000rpm, its up to 300GB, and to make it fit into a reguar 3.5 bay.  The 7200rpm drive that I put in my laptop doesn't seem to run that hot.

I was looking into brive bay adapters, and it turns out that you can put 2 2.5 laptop dives in one 3.5 slot.  Stacked on top of each other.  Its to bad that they don't have better drive bay adaptors out there, or I would be more tempted to do it.  Well its boils down to the fact that I'm on a budget.  I'll be doing a complete system build with the exception of case, psu, and optical drives.  Plus my old hardware is going to my little brother, and I want to get him a good graphics card, and he will need a new psu.  I would like to spend more on hard drives, but just can't afford it.  It would be nice, in my antec 900 I only have 3 3.5 drive bays that are open, unless I want to reduce the cooling.  I could put 4 laptop drives in 2  3.5 bays, and then put a large capacity drive in the third bay for storage, but that  would run about $350, not including the drive bay adaptors, or the time it would take to do a mod. 

I wonder how 4 120GB 7200rpm laptop drives in a RAID 5 would stack up agianst a velociraptor.  You would get more space, it would be cheaper, and your data would be safer.