Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB

A s high-definition content driven by computer users increases, the data storage requirement also increases and we require large capacity storage solutions. Recently, Seagate has launched their new high capacity hard drive, Barracuda XT, which offers 3TB of data storage space with the deployment of five platters (600 GB platter each) and runs at a spindle speed of 7200 RPM. The Seagate Barracuda XT desktop drive is ideal for storage solution environments like SANs because of the high storage capacity on offer. This drive boasts the latest 6GB/s SATA interface along with a healthy 64 MB of cache memory to speed-up data transfer rates. Before we move onto our tests, there are few things you should know about the compatibility issues surrounding 3TB hard drives.

If you are a Windows 7 or Vista user then you can easily avail the benefits offered by a 3TB HDD as a secondary drive, as it requires GUID partition table for drives greater than 2.1TB instead of the ususal Master Boot Record (MBR) partition. Unfortunately, Windows XP does not support drives that are larger than 2.1 TB. We tested this drive on AMD Phenom II X4 965@3.4GHz powered machine with Windows 7 installed, including 4 GB RAM. The barracuda XT performed well and was able to achieve average transfer rates of 118.5MB/s with 17.5 ms of access time which is marginally higher than Hitachi's Deskstar 7K3000 (reviewed this month). Due to a 64 MB cache memory, the HDD attained 237.9MB/s of burst rate which is decent.

Bottomline:The slew of features on offer and good performance make this HDD a decent buy.