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With the advent of solid state drives, even the fastest mechanical hard disk drives don't seem so quick anymore. Solid state drives offer lightning fast response times as well as generally superior read and write speeds compared to traditional drives. However, the good old hard drive still has an advantage and quite a major one for many of us: storage capacity. Even though 1TB SSD's do exist, price per gigabyte isn't even remotely close to a comparable HDD.

Just over a month ago, Seagate announced the Barracuda XT, the world's first SATA 6 Gbps drive. The new standard doubles the bandwidth offered by previous generation technology, taking it to a whooping 600 MB/s. This new drive is built using four cutting edge 500GB platters for a grand total of 2TB, 64MB of cache, rotates at 7200 RPM and is housed in a standard 3.5 inch form factor. With motherboards supporting third generation SATA slowly making an appearance on the market, we are finally ready to find out what kind of performance Seagate's latest high performance drive has to offer.

Let's find out if the Barracuda XT is the next best thing in storage technology or just a bunch of marketing hype!