Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ

Thermal and Acoustics

Heat and sound are also two very important factors in drive performance especially when considering where they will be used. A loud hard drive that becomes warm very quickly may not be the best choice for home theater PCs or any PC without adequate cooling and the noise alone could be a bit annoying. Take a look at how each drive performed as far as heat and noise output goes.

Thermal

The 7200.8 is one of the hottest running drives on the list. While sitting idle, it produces heat of 42 degrees Celsius, as hot as the 10,000RPM Raptor.

During heavy activity, it runs slightly cooler than the Raptor as well as the DiamondMax 10 and 7K400 at 46 degrees. Though not really an issue when it comes to recommended operating temperatures of each drive, the heat that these drives give off can affect the overall temperature and performance of an entire system. We do recommend that users install adequate cooling solutions in their systems to keep temperatures down as much as possible.

Acoustics

To measure the sound output of each drive, we have taken decibel readings as well as recordings of each drive at their startup phase and the sound output while there is disk activity. The recordings can be downloaded below in MP3 format.

Hitachi 7K400: startup | activity
Maxtor DiamondMax 10: startup | activity
Maxtor DiamondMax 16: startup | activity
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9: startup | activity
Samsung SpinPoint 1604N: startup | activity
Samsung SpinPoint 1614C: startup | activity
Samsung SpinPoint 1614N: startup | activity
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7: startup | activity
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: startup | activity
Western Digital Raptor: startup | activity

The loudest drives on the list were Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 (300GB) and DiamondMax 16 as they churned away during Windows XP startup. the 7200.8 and even the 7200.7 were much quieter, but not as quiet as all three of the Samsung drives. They produced noise no louder than about 51.5 dBA at startup and no louder than 52.4 dBA during peak activity.