Seagate first out of the gate with new SATA 6Gbit/s hard drive

Today Seagate announced the first mass production hard drive that will handle the new third-gen SATA standard. The new standard is a 6Gbit/s max transfer rate -- which is roughly double the current, 2nd generation SATA which is capable of 3Gbit/s.

Even besides the new throughput, the hard drive --- called the Barracuda XT -- is a fairly mean piece of hardware. With a whopping 64MB cache, and a downloading-friendly 2TB capacity, the Barracuda XT is set to sell for $300 USD and will be in stores very soon. With these specs, as of now, the Barracuda XT has hardly any competition. 

Perhaps wary of consumer confidence over the whole faulty firmware catastrophe earlier in the year,the drive will ship with a 5-year warranty (some Seagate hard drive product lines had their warranty reduced from 5 years to 3 years in 2009.)

“Capacity and performance remain the defining attributes of hard drives for PC gamers, digital multimedia content developers and many other customers requiring high-end systems at home and in the office,” Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Seagate, was quoted as saying in a press release. “Seagate is meeting these requirements with the first 7200RPM desktop hard drive to combine 2TB of storage capacity with the fastest Serial ATA interface to date.”

If you want to get one of these zippy new drives, be aware that only a few motherboards support this new SATA standard. SATA is backware compatible of course, so the Barracuda XT will still run fine at 3Gbit/s, but if you want to kick into 6Gbit/s territory, you'll need something like the Asus P7P55D or the Gigabyte GA-P55-Extreme.