In what scenarios should one use Western Digital's new 300GB VelociRaptor

WD’s new 10,000 RPM drive has been sent to various hardware websites for testing. The drive has an unfinished firmware but so far seems to score at the top of performance tests, especially for multiuser benchmarks. However it suffers 2 flaws: low capacity and high price. For the same price one could buy 2 750GB Seagate 7200.11 drives and run them in RAID 1 or RAID 0 in order to match the performance of the VelociRaptor and have 2.5 or 5 times as much capacity. I think the only use case is for a large disk array where performance is important but larger number of disks is impractical. I would think a 16-disk array of VelociRaptors might be a better setup than a 32-disk array of 7200.11 drives. I am happy about the low power consumption of the new drives due to their 2.5” design. I’ve compiled a list of reviews and further comparisons below.

• The Tech Report
• Storage Review
• AnandTech
• Tom’s Hardware

A 16-drive array

• 750GB 7200.11 - 6TB in RAID 10, $2100 drive cost, $350/TB
• 300GB VR150 - 4.5TB in RAID 5, $4800 drive cost, $1067/TB

So the VR150 RAID 5 setup is 3x more expensive per TB and I have my doubts that it would perform as well as a RAID 10 setup of 7200.11’s.