once upon a time, i asked whether there were new models around the corner, models to succeed either the sp80 or the 7200.7.
well according to storage reviews, seagate will introduce the 7200.8
www.storagereview.com/Seagate_Barracuda_7200-8.pdf
the following commentary presupposes the unverified factual nature of that pdf.
of relevance to us here, seagate lists their idle whine for 7200.7 as "2.5" bels, whereas the pdf lists 7200.8 idle whine at "2.0 bels"
if a direct comparison to samsung sp80 is possible, samsung sp80 idle whine is 2.7 bels. this would represent a substantial improvement.
this reverses a trend, that 7200.7 is "louder" than V, which in turn is louder than IV. if 2.0 is verified, it would be the most quiet desktop 7200 rpm drive ever..more quiet than even the cuda IV.
it is not clear to me how seagate manage to reduce sound by an order of magnitude over its previous generations. seek noise is not listed.
evidently seagate has gotten wind of competition in silence from samsung and wants the crown back ... much like the extremely fierce competition that erupts between intel v.s amd, or nvidia v.s ati, also 16mb is extremely impressive and generous.
after all, silicon accoustics DUMPED seagate for samsung, which may have been due, in part, to silentpcreview and our forum here.
the single platter aureal density is 133mb unformatted, up from 80 and 100 respectively.
on top of this, it features native command queing and 8 or 16mb of cache.
NCQ requires SATA-II support.
unfortantely for us silent pc enthusiasts, it appears that there is no single platter model available, and i am not aware of any serial ATA-II compliant controller cards, and will not ship until Q3 2004.
samsung...your turn