Who cares if your computer boots faster? How many times a day do you reboot? If I boot more than 2 or 3 times a month, that's a lot, and when I do, I don't sit there and watch the screen. If my computer took 20 minutes to boot, I could see the problem, but an additional 3-4 seconds every 2 weeks or so, does nothing to ruin my computing experience. I don't understand the obsession with boot times. How it performs once it is in Windows is of significantly more importance to me.
Gamingphreek, though your viewpoint may be sound (though not inarguable), your reasoning most certainly isn't. The Raptor has little advantage when transferring large files as its STR is not much faster than standard 7200RPM drives. In fact, if you compare the STR at the 72GB spot on current 250GB+ drives, it's most likely higher than it is at the end of the 72GB Raptor. The places that the Raptor will shine the most is when reading a whole lot of small files, or random reads/writes, or multiple application requests due to the significantly faster access time (over 60% faster than typical 7200RM).
NCQ does pretty much nothing for home users because access patterns of home users are practically all sequential which NCQ will do nothing for. The only time NCQ would typically benefit a home user is if they never defrag their drive which would place data randomly split up all over the platters. Of course that's a pretty stupid strategy to try and gain benefits from a technology, when defragging your drive will result in significantly better performance than a heavily fragmented drive benefiting from NCQ.
Will the Raptor perform better in Windows and give a more responsive system? Absolutely. It's the fastest ATA drive available in the vast majority of situations. Is it worth it to everyone? No, and no one can tell you definitively whether it is worth to you. The only way to determine that yourself is to buy the drive and try it out for yourself.