Thread: Seagate Barracuda XT

While strong State Drives are all the rage recently they contain simply a divide of the general desktop PC storage market. When SSDs are undeniably fast and raise the overall user experience they are also prohibitively costly for many users and offer relatively low capacities. Twirling hard drives with their vast capacitances and low cost per gigabyte however make up the lion's share of the market.

One of the more concerning hard drives to hit the scene latterly is the Seagate Barracuda XT. Its 2TB capacitance 64MB of cache and 7200 RPM spindle speed will automatically offend the interest of many partisans. But couple those characteristics with the drive's support for SATA 6G and the story acquires all the more interesting.

We've tried the Seagate Barracuda XT when plugged to SATA 6G and SATA 3G controllers and compared its operation to a 2TB drive from WD and Seagate's own 7200.11 extending. Take a appear at the XT's total specs below then check out the rest of the piece to see just how this drive performs and whether or not it's worth springing for a SATA 6G capable mobo or controller.

The test the Seagate Barracuda XT we engaged the assist of Asus and their P7P55D Premium motherboard. Between many another things the P7P55D Premium sports a Marvell SATA 6G controller which permitted us to test the Barracuda XT in both SATA 3G and SATA 6G modes on the demand similar platform.

The P7P55D Premium is constructed around Intel's P55 Express chip set for socket 1156 Lynn field-cased Core i5 / i7 CPUs.