Seagate launches world-first 6GBit/s hard disk

Posted on 21 Sep 2009 at 17:34

Seagate has launched the world's first SATA 6Gbit/sec internal hard disk, the 2TB Barracuda XT.

Existing SATA hard disks are limited to a maximum speed of 3Gbit/s or 300MB/s. The Barracuda XT is twice as fast at 6Gbit/s or 600MB/s. These are maximum theoretical speeds however, and we wouldn't expect to see file transfer performance to reach anywhere near these speeds.

The real limits on hard disk performance are currently spindle speed and data density. In these respects, the Barracuda XT doesn't differ greatly from other hard disks currently available: it has a spindle speed of 7,200rpm and uses four 500GB platters. It does have an unusually large 64MB cache though.

Although the Barracuda XT should work fine with existing PC motherboards, to take advantage of any extra performance you'll need a motherboard that supports SATA 6Gbit/s. The first models to do so are those designed for Core i5 processors: Asus' P7P55D Premium (around £200) and Gigabyte's GA-P55-Extreme. This isn't ideal if you're happy with your current processor.

Seagate has yet to confirm pricing for the Barracuda XT, but we'd expect it to cost at least as much as existing SATA 3Gbit/s 2TB hard disks (around £170). The Barracuda XT should be available from retailers shortly and we'll bring you a full review as soon as we can.

Author: Alan Lu

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