Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB SATA 6G HD Review

Although Solid State Drives are all the rage lately, they comprise only a fraction of the overall desktop PC storage market. While SSDs are undeniably fast and enhance the overall user experience, they are also prohibitively expensive for many users and offer relatively low capacities. As such, traditional, spinning hard drives, with their huge capacities and low cost per gigabyte, still make up the lion's share of the market.

One of the more interesting hard drives to hit the scene recently is the Seagate Barracuda XT. Its 2TB capacity, 64MB of cache, and 7200 RPM spindle speed will automatically piqué the interest of many enthusiasts. But couple those features with the drive's support for SATA 6G and the story gets all the more interesting.

We've tested the Seagate Barracuda XT while connected to SATA 6G and SATA 3G controllers, and compared its performance to a 2TB drive from WD, and Seagate's own 7200.11 offering. Take a look at the XT's full specs below, then check out the rest of the piece to see just how this drive performs and whether or not it's worth springing for a SATA 6G capable mobo or controller...

The Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB SATA 6G HD

Our SATA 6G Test Bed

The test the Seagate Barracuda XT, we enlisted the help of Asus and their P7P55D Premium motherboard. Among many other things, the P7P55D Premium sports a Marvell SATA 6G controller, which allowed us to test the Barracuda XT in both SATA 3G and SATA 6G modes on the exact same platform. As its name suggests, the P7P55D Premium is built around Intel's P55 Express chipset for socket 1156 Lynnfield-cased Core i5 / i7 processors. For more information on the P55, please take a look at this article.