Seagate Technology, the world’s largest maker of hard disk drives (HDDs), on Monday initiated shipments of the industry’s first hard drives with Serial ATA-600 interface. Besides new interconnection, the Barracuda XT hard drives feature very high capacities as well as massive onboard cache, which should give a substantial performance boost.

“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. 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,” said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Seagate.

Seagate Barracuda XT 3.5” hard drive offers 2TB capacity, 7200rpm spindle speed, 64MB cache and SATA-600 interface. Seagate declares 4.16ms average latency, 8.5ms random read seek time and 9.5ms random write seek time. Seagate claims that the new HDD has average idle power consumption of 6.39W. The company guarantees meantime before failure (MTBF) of 75,000 hours for its new desktop drive.

The Barracuda XT is a four-platter drive featuring an areal density of 368Gb/square inch. The hard drive’s SATA 6Gb/s interface enables system builders using SATA 6Gb/s drive controllers to build high-performance desktop PCs, full-tilt gaming rigs, and home and small business servers, and its 64MB cache optimizes burst performance and data transfer speeds.

At present Asustek Computer P7P55D Premium and Gigabyte Technology GA-P55-Extreme mainboards support Serial ATA-600 interconnection.

Tags: Seagate, ASUS, Gigabyte