Seagate has launched the world’s first SATA 6Gb/s desktop hard drive, the Barracuda XT (currently the only drive in the XT lineup). While the Barracuda XT’s most obvious feature is it’s SATA 6G interface, it also sports a 4x500GB platter design and a 64MB cache. Seagate is targeting enthusiasts and multimedia professionals with the Barracuda XT, which makes sense given the good blend of speed/capacity.
One of the interesting things about the move to SATA 6G is the improved cache handling. This combined with the 64MB cache should provide a performance jump in cache-intensive applications, and we expect to see a high burst rate in our synthetic benchmarks when we test this drive.
With the addition of the Barracuda XT, the Barracuda lineup is looking strong:
- Barracuda XT – Extreme Performance Desktop
- Barracuda 7200 – Mainstream Desktop
- Barracuda LP (Low Power) – Low Power Applications
MSRP on the Barracuda XT is $299, but Seagate told us that street price could be lower than that. At $299 we can’t wait to get our hands on this drive! We will be getting a demo unit and publishing our testing results in October, so check back then for some benchmarks.
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