Seagate Launches 3TB Barracuda XT

Seagate has long been on of the top two HDD manufactureres in the world, trading blows with Western Digital for several years. Just recently WD leapfrogged Seagate in market share, and while both companies are still alive and well, Seagate is surely looking to gain some market share back. That's likely one reason behind the recent announcement of their 3TB Barracuda XT HDD, their performance-oriented capacity drive. But what about the 2TB barrier in all but the newest PCs?

Performance-wise, the XT ought to be a very speedy HDD. It sports SATA 6Gb/s (though it won't be fast enough to benefit), a 7200RPM spindle speed, 64MB of "optimized" cache, the new 4K sector standard, and increased areal density over last-generation HDDs.

As for the 2TB limit of older machines and OSes, that is mostly an issue with bootability. Whilst it can only be used as a boot drive on newer EFI and Windows 7-equipped machines, BIOS and Windows 7 machines have no trouble seeing the full 3TB, it just cannot be booted. However, XP is only able to see HDD sizes up to 2.1TB. For this, Seagate has provided their DiscWizard software, allowing users to get past this limitation of the venerable but still popular OS. Seagate has set the MSRP to a cent shy of $280, and it will be available in stores soon.