Seagate has refreshed its Barracuda line of hard disk drives with the Barracuda XT – the world's first to market that supports SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s). The new interface spec doubles the theoretical bandwidth of SATA 2 (3Gb/s) – which is what most drives are using today.
The Barracuda XT houses four platters totaling 2TB of storage space, has a 7200RPM spin rate, a sustained data rate of 138MB/s, and is equipped with 64MB of cache. Seagate claims the XT is the fastest among 7200RPM hard drives, and with its plentiful cache it is able to provide "screaming burst rate speeds" to video editing applications and certain PC games.
Obviously, Seagate is targeting the enthusiast crowd with the Barracuda XT, which ships with a 5-year warranty and has an MSRP of $299. I figure most people with $300 to blow on a storage drive would probably opt for a much quicker SSD – but the XT certainly has its place in the crowd.