For the Seagate fans, there has been some exciting new developements with Seagate's new generation of hard drives. The current generation, known for their stability, reliability, performance and low noise to match the Western Digital drives is going to be replaced by the 7200.9 series of drives. Today, Seagate officially announces the joining of the 7200.7 and 7200.8 drives with its 7200.9 line of hard disk drives. The new line ranges from 40GB to 500GB and has models with 2MB, 8MB, or a whopping 16MB buffer. The release of the 7200.9 product line announces the 9th generation of Seagate's 7200RPM desktop hard drives and they conform to the latest in SATA standards (SATA 2.5), including the 3Gb/sec transfer rates. The 7200.9 line of hard disk drives brings an end to the separation of powers and is aimed at mid to high end desktop and gaming PCs, media PCs, and low end servers. ... Seagate reports that all of the drives in the 7200.9 line will feature an operating shock tolerance of about 63Gs and a non-operating shock of just under 350Gs, making them extremely rugged. Almost all but Hitachi's 7K500 drive can handle this much non-operating shock, but shock tolerance during normal operation is not as forgiving, with many drives only allowing about 55Gs. Not that we would recommend dropping your drives or computer, but accidents happen... Seagate is also reporting a lower sound rating between 25-28 decibels while the drives are idle, and about 28-32 decibels while the drives are seeking for data. The lowest amount of sound audible by human ears is 26 decibels, so the idle noise output is borderline inaudible to our ears. Combine this with the hum of case and heat sink fans, and the hard drive is basically silent. Anandtech Article.
I dont really have much faith in seagtes since yours died, but if there cheap and have a large capacity Ill have one.
I have noticed that since the Baraccuda line was released, Seagate has been even more reliable than my other favorite HDD manufacturer, Western Digital.
