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back to article Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB Sata 3.0 HDD

The Seagate Barracuda XT is the latest 2TB hard drive to land on our test bench, following on from the WD Caviar Black and Green and the Hitachi Ultrastar. It’s the largest capacity Seagate we have seen since the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 so you may think that Seagate was as keen as mustard to scatter review samples to the waiting …

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  1. Ron1
    Alert

    @Reg: Tested on 2009-12-16?

    If your machine's date is right, you've been sitting on this test for exactly 4 weeks before releasing it?

    Request from the vendor?

    Care to explain?

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  2. Greg J Preece

    Good in RAID?

    It's a pity you couldn't test it in RAID. Sure, a mechanical spinny drive isn't going to saturate the interface, but they still have the highest/most cost effective storage capacity by far. Sticking 4 of these in a RAID array could make for some impressive speed increases. Looking at upgrading my 2TB RAID 5 array this year, and if someone makes a PCI-X SATA3 RAID controller, that could be quite good.

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    1. Nexox Enigma
      Reply Icon

      No advantage for a RAID

      """Sticking 4 of these in a RAID array could make for some impressive speed increases."""

      Actually, you're looking at either A) The exact speed increase for using the same number of drives with SATA 2.0 or B) Going to saturate your controller. Drives don't share the 3 or 6 gbit speed, they each get that much bandwidth, so as long as your drives don't saturate SATA 2.0 (Which we can see that they do not,) you'll get no speed boost from 3.0. As an example, my 5 drive software raid 5, running on my (crappy) nvidia onboard SATA 2.0 ports can easily do sequential read and write at above 300MB/s, and that's with 2 year old drives.

      So to sum up: it'll be years before high capacity spinning drives will be able to take advantage of SATA 3.0, RAID or not.

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      1. Annihilator
        Reply Icon
        Boffin

        Years

        "it'll be years before high capacity spinning drives will be able to take advantage of SATA 3.0, RAID or not"

        Not really, the next doubling of density of the disk surface should push us into SATA3.0 realms.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    SATA 3.0 Bus?

    So what about when the bus is full?

    Does Sata 3 work better with multiple drives?

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  4. andrew mulcock

    SSD

    Now, when SATA 3 and SSD drives go together, that could be fast.

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  5. ivon the terrible

    Ivon the Terrible

    How did you fit a i7 940 chip LGA1366 on a P55A motherboard LGA1156. Heavy use of the scissors?

    1 1
  6. Ammaross Danan
    FAIL

    @Ivon

    "How did you fit a i7 940 chip LGA1366 on a P55A motherboard LGA1156."

    It's simple. You buy the LGA1156 version of the i7 940 chip.

    1 1
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