Seagate's Barracuda line has long been a contender in the 7,200rpm drive space and-7200.11 firmware snafu notwithstanding-has generally vied with WD's Caviar Black line for the 7,200rpm crown.

Speedy sequential speeds; handy disk wizard for novice users; capacious

Slightly slower than Deskstar in real-world test; slightly more expensive

This isn't the drive that you'll choose only for storage, but more for Primary drive with a lot of space at the back. Unlike Western Digital where you will need an HBA, you'll use the utility to use the "unusable" space that remains behind during OS Installation.

After pushing the capacity boundaries of external HDDs, Seagate has brought a three-terabyte internal drive to the desktop PC with the Barracuda XT 3TB.

Desktop storage has been stuck at 2TB for quite a while. Higher platter density is needed in order to break the 3TB barrier, which leads to the industry-wide adaptation of 4K advanced format, replacing the 512 sector that was introduced back in the 80's.

Excellent performance; Balanced read and write; 3TB capacity; SATA 6Gb/s; DiscWizard software for disk cloning and backup; 5 year warranty

DiscWizard will not work with RAID; May have issue with some chipset (buyers should check with the motherboard chipset manufacturer first

When it comes to digital storage, you can't have enough. Whether you download a lot of music, take a lot of pictures, or are a file hoarder, you know the GB's can add up. Now-a-days, companies are offering large drives, and don't make you sacrifice speed to do so.

We check out the first hard drive to use the new SATA 6Gb/s standard and come with 64MB of cache.

In this review PCSTATS will be testing out Seagate's 2TB, 6Gb/s SATA III Barracuda XT hard drive. This 3.5" desktop hard drive features an increased 64MB onboard cache where other 2TB drives only have 32MB and it supports Native Command Queing (NCQ).

The newest EcoGreen is a huge improvement noise-wise over the disappointing F3. Measuring only 13 dBA and 15 dBA at one meter when idle and seeking, respectively, the acoustics of the 2TB F4 at last brings EcoGreen parity with Caviar Green.

After pushing the capacity boundaries of external HDDs, Seagate has brought a three-terabyte internal drive to the desktop PC with the Barracuda XT 3TB . With 3TB being the largest capacity offered by Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi, you now get 50 per cent more space than the previous giants...

The majority of PC users out there have regular mechanical hard drives in their computers, it's going to be a long time before SSDs replace them. Hard drive companies like Seagate know this and they're not going to stop improving the technology, with the introduction of the new SATA 3 interface...

Very fast drive; Large capacity; New SATA 3 interface

SATA 6G Deowsn't make much difference really