The Seagate Barracuda XT is supposed to be the fastest hard drive with a capacity of two terabytes. Its platters are running at up to 7200 rpm and the SATA interface with a transfer speed of up to 6 GiBit/s provides a more than acceptable bandwidth.

Of course the interface is downwards compatible. Thus the new hard drive can be used with ordinary STAT controllers. The first motherboards with P55 chipset that support the faster interface are already available, too. Marvell offers appropriate chips which are used as controller on hard drives and motherboards (in addition to the Intel Southbridge).

Data is stored on four platters. This results in a density of 368 GBit per square inch. Seagate specifies the average access time with 8.5 milliseconds for read and 9.5 milliseconds for write operations. The MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is said to be 750000 hours. In idle mode the hard drive needs only 6.39 watt. According to Seagate the Barracuda XT reaches 2.8 to 3.2 Bel. 3 Bel are equal to about 0.5 sone or 35 dB(A).

A price has not been announced yet, but since the first shipments have already been made, the hard drive is supposed to become available, soon.