I was looking for the best single drive that wasn't over priced, and wondered on to a thread that states that the certian Seagate drives have NCQ the way that its suppose to be, an dthat these drives perform almost 3 times faster when multi-acessing the drive. The 7200.11 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB have been confirmed to have working NCQ that speeds up multi drive acesses.  Its suppose to give an incredible boost when multi tasking.

http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=26006

http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=26965

And I actually like WD drives, so this is coming from somone that isn't into seagate drives, but I think its worth checking out.

 Joe you are looking to setup a RAID 5 correct?

I am looking to throw together a raid array on my home server so if you find yourself a good card and great deals on HDDs you should let me know!

These are kinda cool reads, although I don't know if i want to jump on until the prices drop a bit -- < $150 GOOD TB drives or maybe even 1.5TB drives. Performance is definitely there though!

Think I'm going to put the RAID 5 off since this is for my desktop, and just going with a single drive.  At least until I can find an affordable hardware based RAID 5 card that doesn't have a loud fan.  I just span the drives in my home server.  That way I can add to it when ever I want, and I don't have to buy all my drives at once.  I've debated using a RAID 5 in my server, but I always come to the conclusion that spaning them is better in my situation.  You know that some file systems have limits to the size of a drive they can have right.  I believe that windows NTFS file system has a 2TB limit.  There are ways around it though, just giving you a heads up.

http://www.carltonbale.com/2007/05/how-to-break-the-2tb-2-terabyte-file-system-limit/

The dive that I'm looking at right now is the seagate 620GB with 2 320GB platters, and a 32mb cache.  Its not confirmed to have working NCQ, but I'll just cross my fingers, and if it doesn't I can always throw it in my server for storage.

Might actually put off my build for a little longer.  Stock is dirt cheap right now, and would be a good investment with my extra cash.

 I have thought the same thing -- maybe invest in nVidia now that they are almost as low as they've been in a long time.....

I had not heard of such a barrier with NTFS formatting -- I will def. look into your link. Thanks joe!