What's the deal with VelociRaptor drives?

I don't want to start a flame war, and I don't want to offend anybody, but I don't see the point of a VelociRaptor HDD in a world with consumer SSDs.

I understand that at the price/capacity ratio, a VelociRaptor is much cheaper than SSD at say anything bigger than 256GB, but can the read/write times the VelociRaptor even touch what an SSD can do?

I could see a guy buying VelociRaptor drives for a RAID array or something if you wanted a lot of fast storage and didn't want to take out a second mortgage for four big SSDs. Other than that, I just don't see what appeal the VelociRaptor has over today's SSDs. Am I missing something?

Actually, a 2TB Caviar Black SATA-3 will usually beat a Velociraptor on sustained transfers.
Velociraptors have 5 year warranty and enterprise durability plus faster access times.

But comparing a platter drive to SSD is a bit of apples and oranges. Each has its place in a world of multiple needs and configurations.

Must be some interest in the business high speed data servers out there.

Wasn't the NSA or the TSA building a mega facility out west to retain all emails, tweets, and chats? Got to store all of that data some place some how for big borther to track you.

So, ... You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be held against you in a court of law. Thus what is emailed, tweeted, chatted ...etc. can be recalled against you.

Plus the fact that some people do not have a need for the super fast drives.

To read e-mail, surf the web and play games on pogo any computer that will start is pretty much good enough.

Years ago I used to run a Raptor. At the time, before SSD's, it was the fastest drive you could buy, well, not counting crazy expensive 15k rpm SCSI's, but I digress. Anyway, there was a noticeable but not great difference between Raptors and regular SATA drives. However, that can not compare to the HUGE difference in boot times, game loads, and overall speed of opening programs I get with an SSD compared to a modern SATA drive. My Samsung 1tb feels broken sometimes compared to my OCZ SSD.

As stated above, Prior to SSD's I purchased Raptors in different flavors and some recent 7200 rpm Drives were pretty close in speed too for quite a bit less dough.

I still have 36gb,74gb raptors I use daily on a few machines, I have has 15K Scsi machines in the past only cause I got the hardware dirt cheap and wanted to play around.

Still got to love SSD's, prices are still dropping and soon even a high capacity drive >250 GB will be very tempting.