Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB SATA3 Hard Disk Drive Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: RWL Staff Article Publish Date: 8/22/2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                Space, the final frontier......Well this may not be Star Trek and i certainly am not the legendary Gene Roddenberry but that phrase has played a rather negative part in my life, and everyone else’s around computers, for a long time. I am speaking of course about data space restrictions and not the real thing, although i have to admit that the second does sound cooler. Anyways for the past 5 years HDD price have taken a plunge and now we find ourselves capable of purchasing 1TB (1000GB) for less than 90euros/USD100 which from the price view point is great news. Still with the all increasing internet speeds people can fill 1TB quite easily. For that reason leading companies such as Seagate have introduced 2TB models in the market and even announced the soon to be available 3TB models. Today’s review is for such a model, the Barracuda XT 2TB, which as you will see later on is one of the fastest conventional HDD in the market today, if not the fastest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

     Founded in 1979, Seagate is the leading provider of storage devices–in 2008, we became the first hard drive manufacturer to ship 1 billion hard drives–with the industry’s broadest product offering. Our products include 2.5–inch and 3.5–inch hard disk drives, solid state drives and hybrid drives (which incorporate both rotating media and flash memory) for compute–intensive enterprise environments that demand high performance, low–power consumption and proven reliability. In 2009, Seagate developed its first solid–state drives (SSDs) that leverage non–volatile flash memory instead of spinning magnetic media. Seagate’s first SSDs were designed for enterprise environments utilizing blade and general server applications. We followed that up in 2010 with a solid state hybrid drive for laptops–a product with a unique algorithm that enables the drive to “learn” which files are needed most often and then places them in the drive’s on–board flash memory for lightning–fast access. Seagate’s products enable high–performance desktop and laptop systems, along with ultraportable devices such as netbooks and thin laptops. We delivered the industry’s first 2TB, 7,200–RPM desktop hard drive, along with the world’s first 7mm, 2.5–inch form factor drive. These innovative storage products deliver super–sized capacities, industry–leading performance, encrypted security features and more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

      Now as most of you are aware we recently jumped from the usual for quite some time now SATA2 protocol that supported speeds of up 3.0Gb/s to SATA3 which can support speeds of up to 6.0Gb/s. Now ordinarily this would mean a huge performance increase for any system using SATA3 instead of SATA2, if the numbers were practical and not theoretical. You see mechanical drives can't really even get close to the SATA2 theoretical speeds of 300Mb/s (or 3.0Gb/s), not unless you use more than one in RAID, and even the fastest SSDs in the market as we speak have a hard time catching up so SATA3 has a long way to go and almost certainly mechanical drives will never even get close to such speeds (600Mb/s). In any case the Barracuda XT is using the latest SATA3 protocol and in order to see what speed increases one may expect by jumping from SATA2 to SATA3 todays review is more of a comparison than a just plain review.