The guys at The Tech Report are reviewing the new Seagate 7200.8 HDD with 400 GB capacity.  Seem a bit much?  They don’t think so.  But what about performance?
Our benchmark results were mixed, making it hard to unreservedly recommend the Barracuda 7200.8 over the other drives in the test group. For example, the drive’s comparably weak performance in IOMeter, where it’s not only slower than the DiamondMax 10 but also the Barracuda 7200.7, suggests that the latest ‘cuda may not be the best drive for server or multi-user environments. The drive’s IOMeter performance is certainly disappointing, and I can’t help but wonder whether the drive would have fared better with 16MB of cache.