Seagate Intros World-Beating 2TB Barracuda XT HDD: 7200RPM, 6Gb/sec SATA
Today, the company began shipping the world’s fastest, largest-capacity mainstream desktop hard drive: the Barracuda XT. While other 2TB drives have remained appealing with slower spindle speeds but lower power consumption as well (recall WD's 2TB Caviar Black, full review soon!) , Seagate is making the competition look a few steps behind with its 7200RPM beast that supports a new faster interface as well. Not only does this 3.5" consumer drive provide 2TB of storage and a speedy 7200RPM spindle speed, but it also features a 6Gb/second SATA interface.
Seagate designed this one to "meet the capacity demands of gaming, digital video-environments and other storage-hungry desktop computing applications while delivering the highest performance in its class," and at least on paper, we see no reason to not believe 'em. With high-end outfits shipping desktop-centric RAID SSD solutions, it was only a matter of time before HDD vendors stepped up their efforts to add a pinch of speed. The Barracuda XT, a four-platter drive featuring an areal density of 368 Gigabits per square inch, delivers the highest performance with burst speeds of up to 6 Gigabits per second. For all PC applications, it also maintains backward compatibility with the SATA 3Gb/second and SATA 1.5Gb/second interfaces, and uses the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration and upward migration.
Of course, you'll need a SATA 6Gb/s motherboard (currently available from Asus and Gigabyte) in order to fully take advantage of the speed, but hey, look at it as the perfect excuse to finally splurge on that system upgrade you've been meaning to get to. Seagate's new 'Cuda should a star of the show out at IDF this week and it's weighing in a an MSRP of just $299 for 2TB of goodness...
"Capacity and performance remain the defining attributes of hard drives for PC gamers, digital multimedia content developers and many other customers requiring high-end systems at home and in the office," said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Seagate. "Seagate is meeting these requirements with the first 7200RPM desktop hard drive to combine 2TB of storage capacity with the fastest Serial ATA interface to date."
With Barracuda XT drives and SATA 6Gb/s motherboards from ASUS and Gigabyte, computer makers can build the highest-performance PCs, workstations and entry-level servers. ASUS was first to market with a SATA 6Gb/s motherboard; the company's P7P55D Premium began shipping in August. The new GIGABYTE P55 series GA-P55-Extreme motherboards are also now shipping.
Comments
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I'll buy it simply because you can see the drive head moving across the platter and the drive itself produces a cool yellow halo. |
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Yeah! Great excuse to buy a clear chassis. |
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wrap it up I'll take it! |
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The Asus P7P55D Premium was the only motherboard which had SATA 6G in its specs (Asus' website isn't the easiest to navigate, so I may have missed one). Gigabyte hinted that their GA-P55-UD4P would have it, which would have been nice (it's $100 less than the Asus Premium mobo), but I believe that they were caught up in the Marvell controller problem and took it out of the design. Now I'm wondering which released Gigabyte board actually has SATA 6G. |
Guessing you mean to replace USB 3.0 with SATA III, or officially named SATA 6Gbps from SATA II, or offically named SATA 3Gbps.
Its nice to see that SATA III drives are coming out, but its such a waste on mechanical drives since they are just starting to break over SATA I (SATA 1.5Gbps) data transfer rate. These would be much better positioned in SSD's which quiet a few drives could probably increase there read speeds or have there read speeds automatically jump due to the bandwidth limitation currently on SATA II. |
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@deathman: I believe they did mean to make the USB 2.0 -> USB 3.0 analogy. We have two third-gen standards coming out at more or less the same time, which will confuse some people. Thank heavens the PCIe 3.0 interface isn't due until 2010.
The SATA-IO, which is the group defining new standards for this interface, would rather you call the new flavor "SATA 6Gb/sec" although tech writers have settled on the term "SATA 6G".
But yeah, it's overkill for a mechanical drive. And even for the current crop of SSDs, at least the ones normal people can afford, SATA 3G (SATA-II) is hard to saturate. The ones which normal people can't afford, such as the OCZ Zdrive, use a PCIe slot (x4 seems to be the popular choice) and avoid the disk interface completely. |
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