Seagate ships first SATA 3.0 hard drive for desktops

Seagate Technology has announced that it is shipping the Barracuda XT, a 7200RPM desktop hard drive with a 2TB of storage capacity and 64MB of cache. More importantly, the XT is the first such drive to feature a 6Gbps SATA 3.0 interface. Used together with 6Gbps-capable SATA motherboards, Seagate says that computer makers can use it to build the "the highest performance" PCs and workstations.

Traditional hard disk drive (HDD) manufactures are facing the pressure posed by increasingly price competitive solid state drive (SSD).  Seagate has been slow to move into this arena so far though, while previous non-players in the storage arena such as Intel, OCZ and even Samsung have come up with multiple drives with HDD-trumping performance.

For now, HDDs remains the champion when it comes to price-capacity value. The Barracuda XT is available at a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $299.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at Computerworld

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