Seagate is the next harddrive maker to roll out 3TB harddrives and the new top model, Seagate Barracuda XT, focus more on performance than any previous solutions we’ve seen. Seagate has, beside SATA 6.0 Gbps interface and 7200 RPM engine, made sure that all of the capacity can be used even on all older systems.
When we tested Western Digital’s Caviar Green 3TB we concluded that it requires a newer 64-bit operating system to gain access to the entire drive.
Seagate claims that the Barracuda XT 3TB harddrive solves this problem. It uses larger 4K sectors and a custom software called Seagate DiscWizard that makes it possible to use the entire harddrive even with older systems like Windows XP and no UEFI. This is accomplished by splitting the harddrive into partitions where none is bigger than 2.1 TB.
Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB comes with 64MB cache and can reach speeds up to 149 MB/s with 9 watt power consumption during load. The harddrive makes noise up to 28 Db at idle and 32 Db at search.
