TechwareLabs has published the editorial: Hacking the Seagate 1.5TB Drive to turn it into a Velociraptor Killer. Here's a taster:

Look at it this way, the 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor is approximately ~$229 while the price of the Seagate 1.5TB drive is approximately ~$119 at the time of this writing. Now what you end up with is a drive that is higher in performance in all regards except seek times at a lower cost per GB. We are all about getting more for less around here. The added benefit is that you can always go back and reclaim that 1.2TB at any time, try to expand the Velociraptor at a later date (good luck).

It looks like Seagate inadvertently created something marvelous by creating arguably the best consumer drive on the market. As you have seen from the benchmarks, the Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS outperforms the Velociraptor in almost all categories. Coming in at $119.99 at newegg.com, the Barracuda is also approximately $110 cheaper when compared to the Velociraptor's $229.99 price tag at newegg.com. The huge price difference makes the conclusion very simple, the Barracuda wins in both performance per price as well as raw performance thus making it a better buy than the Velociraptor. No matter what your budget for a computer is, having an extra $110 just means that it could be better spent in other components of your system such as RAM of a Graphics card.