Seagate First With SATA 6Gb/sec. 2 TB Drive
Seagate today started shipments of the Barracuda XT, which boasts the fastest SATA connection yet.
The Barracuda XT is a 7200 RPM 3.5-inch hard drive featuring 2 TB of storage capacity and a SATA 6 Gb/sec. interface.
"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," said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Seagate. "Seagate is meeting these requirements with the first 7200 RPM desktop hard drive to combine 2 TB of storage capacity with the fastest Serial ATA interface to date."
Of course, before you go blazing off with a SATA 6 Gb/sec. drive, you're going to need a motherboard that supports it. Right now, such boards aren't yet commonplace, but right now options include Asus' P7P55D Premium and Gigabyte's P55 series GA-P55-Extreme motherboards.
Only the 10k and 15k drives run that hot. 7200 should be around the same temperature. Even the 3Gb 15k drives run hot so that wasn't a big surprise from the article
so drives are struggling to saturate the bandwidth of sata 1, let alone sata 2.
atleast sata2 added NCQ.
sata 3 for this drive is just a marketing gimmick.
also the article is misleading at the end, are they saying sata 3 is NOT backwards compatible? are they saying this drive won't work plugged into an sata 2 or 1 port?? I doubt it.
They do, they are called "raid editions" or "enterprise class", or "surveillance"
also, drive reliability is fairly unimportant. I mean, I don't care if the drive has a 10% chance of failing, or a 0.1%, as long as there is a chance, I'm still going to have everything backed up. (within reason of course, I'd still want atleast 3 years warranty). Having said that, I agree that all the gay firmware issues popping up lately are inexcusable.
Western Digital any day over Seagate.
By the time Seagate does an even more lengthy QA the competition (WD) would have something out a long time ago. There are times when a good product is good enough.
I couldn't agree more here. We haven't even topped out SATA 1 yet, and are no where near. The newer features SATA 2 brought were nice. Most average hard drives barely knock on the door of 100 mb/sec, let alone typical SSD's are in the 200-250 MB/sec range. Unless someone is running dedicated servers or running 15 SSD drives in RAID 0, what good is the 6000 MB/sec overhead?
I convinced the higher-ups that we could wait a few weeks and get them anyway. We ordered 9 of them once I confirmed our vendor was shipping the ones with the new firmware.
7 of the drives went into 24/7 service last May and fortunately I haven't had the need yet to try out either of the 2 spares.
Seagate isn't a memory manufacturer. You're more likely to see SSD drives from companies that make RAM. Examples: OCZ, Kingston, Crucial, etc... Seagate will still continue making spinning disks for high capacity purposes.