The Barracuda XT is a 7200rpm 3.5-inch desktop drive featuring 2TB of storage capacity and a fast Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second interface.

Third generation Serial ATA technology is finally here. Today we are going to take a look at the new Seagate Barracuda XT, the first SATA 6 Gb/s hard drive to hit the TweakTown Test Lab.

Seagate's new 2TB hard disk ushers in the new SATA standard - but don't call it SATA III. Piqued by misuse of the name SATA II (in reality a committee rather than a specification), the SATA standards organisation has urged manufacturers to refer to the new interface only by its official name: SATA...

Support for 6Gbps Serial ATA may be the Barracuda XT's most intriguing attribute, but the 'cuda has little to offer the standard. By Seagate's own admission, the drive's mechanical platters aren't nearly fast enough to need even a 200MB/s link, let alone the 300MB/s one provided by the second-gen...

Too costly for a 2TB drive and the new interface simply doesn't make up for it

Huge; …and quick with it

New interface does little; Ridiculously expensive

When computer technology takes a step forward, it is sometimes better to stick with the status quo and let someone else help the industry recoup their R&D investment. When video cards first jumped from the AGP slot to PCI Express, for instance: PCI Express videocards didn't deliver enough of a...

Huge capacity (2TB; 64MB cache; Very fast burst read; Five-year warranty

Expensive; SATA 6Gb/s interface yields negligible performance gains; Activating SATA 6Gb/s interface on current motherboards prevents dual-GPU operation

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.

High Capacity; Good Performance; 64MB Cache; 7200 RPM

SATA 6G Didn't Help Performance; Much More Expensive than somewhat slower; similar capacity drives

Now that motherboards with the Intel P55A Chipset are flooding the channels, it means USB 3.0 and SATA3 devices are going to become more popular. But, we're just now starting to see these peripherals leaking in to the market albeit very slowly and in limited quantities.

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

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...