Best med-sized HDD recommendation needed

[lopri]

I am looking for two HDDs for my Boot/OS/Apps partition. (RAID0) Since data will be stored in two 500GB HDDs in RAID1, there is no need of big capacity (500GB+) for this partition. As a matter of fact, I'd prefer a small and lean HDDs.

I've tried Raptors, but they are too loud for my liking. With Vista's aggressive fetching, HDD noise became a big annoyance to me. (I guess nothing is free) So I'm in search of best compromise between performance/noise among 160GB~250GB HDDs. I strongly prefer one platter per disk solution.

Any input would be appreciated.

 

[lopri]

Currently considering;

SAMSUNG Spinpoint S HD161HJ

Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600AAJS

Where can I find information regarding the number of platters?

 

[SickBeast]

I did find this article on the WD drive. It is indeed single-platter.

 

[lopri]

Thank you. I wonder if AAKS (16mb cache) version is also a single platter?

 

[j0j081]

so single platter is better if you don't need a ton of space?

 

[GarfieldtheCat]

Originally posted by: j0j081
so single platter is better if you don't need a ton of space?

In general, less platters means less noise, less power, and less heat.

Also, less platters means higher density per platter (for a given size), and higher density also equals better performance as well.

So it's usually a double win.