HDD capacity has been increasing over the years. From my still in use HDD of 80GB, it has grown to 160GB, 500GB, 1TB and 1.5TB. Seagate Barracuda XT up the ante with world's first 2TB 3.5" SATA3 HDD. It supports SATA-IO's Serial ATA 6Gb/s interface. The Barracuda XT is built with  4 platter 7200rpm framework and comes with a 64MB cache.

This new HDD looks identical to the older Barracuda series. The most important changes would be the enlarged cache and also the 6Gbps (SATA3) interface. As it is still the traditional HDD, it is able to achieve a burst speed of 6 Gbps in theory. A sustained data rate should be around 138MB/s (spec).

The new Barracuda XT (or model ST32000641AS) is a 3.5-in, 7,200RPM desk top drive with 64MB of cache. It carries a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $299.

Initially, Seagate sees only a niche market for the drive, but said that by 2011, it expects that SATA 3.0 motherboards will be ubiquitous and that applications will require the drive's 6Gbit/sec bandwidth.

To achieve SATA3 speeds, you would need a mainboard that support SATA3 interface. To date, there are only a couple of Intel P55 boards that comes with such an interface. The ASRock P55 Deluxe is one such board that comes with a PCIe interface SATA3 card that is able to support it. Other boards include the Gigabyte GA-P55 Extreme and ASUS P7P55D Premium.

Although the burst speed is high, the sustained speed of a HDD is definitely lower than a SSD device. We have seen in our previous article that of a ES SSD drive powered by the Marvell 88SE9123 chipset to be exceptionally fast with a sustained speed of 300MB/s. So far, other than the Intel P55 platform, other boards (X58, X48, P45) and the AMD camp has no boards supporting this new interface as yet.

On the next page, we take a look at the performance of a Seagate ES 1TB version of this drive tested with the SATA3 card running on ASRock P55 Deluxe mainboard.

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