Re: Boot Drive: 7200 vs 10000

i don't know if i'd try to change out the heat sink, it may effect the warranty but it does seem rather straight forward. since you have a tech-guy, you should run it by him to see what he thinks.

either of the optical bay drive mounting kits would be decent solutions. the maxpower kit is pricey ($129), but the pro caddy is only $39 (w/o the sata-to-ide adapter).

you might talk to your tech-guy to see how comfortable he would be running a sata cable from the velociraptor in the optical bay to one of the sata connections on the motherboard and routing power from the molex connector that is for the 2nd optical drive (there should be an adapter). i think i would rather have the velociraptor connected to the sata bus rather than the ide bus, but maybe it doesn't make a difference... i'm not a tech-guy by trade (more by necessity) but he may have better input on that. plus, your not modifying the drive, so no warranty problems there.

to answer your other question, i think the speed of the velociraptor would be better used as a boot drive and disk cache for ae. the greater speed advantage it seems to have over the other sata drives is in random reads and writes which would be great for a boot/cache drive. also, ae really won't take great advantage of a fast media drive, it's just not a realtime app. (of course fcp would love it....).

all that being said,your 10k raptors are pretty fast boot drives too. so if you go the easy route and return the velociraptor, i don't think you'll be too disappointed with performance.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW