Raptors are pretty outdated. That being said, if you are looking into purchasing a Velociraptor, then there is still some use for it.
The velociraptors are great for game drives where you still want fast access, but need plenty of space. The modern gaming config standard that a lot of people use is to have an SSD as the boot volume (or two SSD's in raid-0 or raid-1 if you want redundancy instead), have a velociraptor as the game drive, and have a big 2 TB WD black or some such as the media drive. The sustained throughput on the WD black drives is pretty decent but the access time is slow, making it great for watching movies or streaming media but not that great for gaming.
SSD's tear up a raptor in terms of performance but they are expensive and don't have that much room. Modern games, if you take into account all the mods you can plop on, can easily hit the 20 GB for a single game nowadays (as an example, FakeFactory is a mod that is something like 11+ GB for the mod alone).
On my new rig I was installing games right to the SSD and realized suddenly that I hardly had any room left and had to start uninstalling. At least this will hold true until the larger SSD's hit the market in 2011, such as the Intel G3, which supposedly will be 600 GB for the largest size. Keep in mind it will still cost a ton though to get that much space.
