Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 SATA NCQ Hard Drive

Overall, I was quite pleased by the 7200.8's performance. The RAID performance came in right around where I expected it to. Since I didn't have competing drives to test in RAID, I paid particular attention to the single drive performance. For the most part, the 7200.8 outclasses the Maxtor DiamondMax9 Plus like we would expect it to considering how much better it is on paper.

Because of their capacity, low noise level and performance, I look forward to using these drives when I rebuild my main rig. Having 400GB (it's really 372GB) of storage is a great luxury, and as you know, luxury doesn't come cheap. The 400GB 7200.8 costs around $290-300 if you shop at the right places. The unit cost of 73-75 cents per gigabyte is very reasonable though, so the only reason this drive seems "expensive" is that it packs a huge capacity. It might not be the cheapest 400GB drive available, but I think getting the industry-leading 5-year warranty is worth the extra cost. That 5-year warranty covers the entire service life of the drive, which is a nice security blanket.

If performance is your first priority, you might want to check out a review that compares these 7200.8 drives to Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 drives. From what I've seen, the Maxtor drives outperform the 7200.8's, due at least in part to Maxtor's utilization of a 16MB cache. It would be nice to see Seagate go with 16MB of cache like the DiamondMax 10. Let's hope Seagate decides to improve the 7200.8 line by doubling its current cache some time soon. Or at least unleash a bigger cache when releasing SATA II drives. A SATA II drive with 16MB of cache sounds quite tasty, doesn't it?!

Pros:

+ Good performance
+ Big time storage!
+ Affordable at $0.75/GB
+ 5-year warranty
+ Relatively quiet

Cons:

- Would be nice to see 16MB cache versions

Final Score: 9 out of 10 and the Bjorn3D Seal of Approval