Seagate Driving Storage Performance And Capacity With Barracuda XT

The new Seagate Barracuda XT 3.5-inch hard drive also features a 7,200-rpm spin rate and a 64-MB cache to increase performance.

The Barracuda XT puts both performance capacity in a single drive for use in high-end workstations and external storage devices, said David Burks, director of product marketing for Seagate's Barracuda family.

"Before, to get 2 TBs, you needed to sacrifice performance," Burks said. "Or for performance, you needed smaller hard drives."

To take advantage of the new 6-Gbit-per-second (6Gbps) SATA interface, system builders and solution providers will need to match the new drives to motherboards or interface cards with 6Gbps SATA controllers, Burks said.

New motherboards from Asus and Gigabyte featuring a 6Gbps chipset from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Marvell are already available, Burks said.

In addition to the combination of 2-TB capacity and 6Gbps performance, the introduction of the Seagate Barracuda XT has a couple of features specific for the channel, Burks said.

The drive is being released Monday to distribution, with OEM shipping dates to be announced later, Burks said. List price for the new drives is $299.

Also, the storage vendor's new Seagate Barracuda XT includes a five-year warranty instead of the three-year warranty that comes standard with the vendor's other Barracuda desktop PC drives.

The addition of a 6Gbps SATA interface will mean an immediate performance benefit for high-end workstations, Burks said. "But across the board, there won't be a big bump in performance until other aspects of the technology exploit the new bandwidth," he said.

The release of the new Seagate Barracuda XT drives comes about a month after Hitachi Global Storage Technologies released its Deskstar 7K2000, which also features 2 TB of capacity and a 7,200-rpm spin rate. However, the Deskstar 7K2000 has a 3Gbps SATA interface.