Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB HDD [World's Fastest Desktop Hard Drive, Serial ATA 6Gb/s Interface, 7200 RPM]

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Today is the day that hard drive makers worldwide are placed on notice. Seagate has fired the shot heard ‘round the world and it has data storage architects scrambling to find their footing. So what’s the big deal, you ask? How about the HDD equivalent of the first sonic boom? Seagate Technology announced today that it had began global shipments of the Barracuda® XT HDD. Oh, sure, yet another hard drive. Big deal.  The Barracuda just so happens to be the world’s fastest, largest-capacity mainstream desktop hard drive on the market. Does that have your attention? Thought so.

The Barracuda XT is a 7200RPM hard disk drive that features a mammoth 2TB of storage capacity and a blazing fast Serial ATA interface that has been clocked at 6Gb/second. The 3.5-in desktop drive is also the industry’s first to feature an SATA 6Gb/s interface. This type of speed and performance is critical for those folks that work and play within the digital video editing and gaming environments. With the launch of the Barracuda XT, Seagate has effectively doubled the current storage bandwidth of computers as we know them.

The drool-worthy specs of the Barracuda XT only get better from here. It sports a four-platter drive that has an areal density of 368 Gigabits per square inch. This, along with the drive’s 64MB cache, is what gives this HDD the ability to reach burst speeds of up to 6 Gigabits per second. Is that even legal? If you’re worried about compatibility with your old SATA 3Gb/second and SATA 1.5Gb/second interfaces, worry no more. Seagate has informed us that the new Barracuda XT is completely backwards compatible with both. It also uses the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations.

The word on the street is that the new Barracuda XT HDD is on sale now for $299. Seagate will also demonstrate the new Barracuda XT HDD and its SATA 6Gb/s technology at the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) booth, #425, at IDF, September 22 – 24 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. You can get more info by visiting www.seagate.com.