Conclusion
It is clear that SATA III has a lot of potential but sadly we won’t being seeing that potential realized with mere 7200 RPM drives. The Seagate barracuda provides a valiant attempt at greatness but sadly is limited by the hardware in order to bypass some of that limitation I plan to attempt the use of the performance mod that our staff member Artiom demonstrated with the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS, if I am successful I will add additional results here. Overall the Barracuda XT will be a great upgrade for those who have older SATA II 7200RPM drives and plan to upgrade their motherboard with a SATA III supporting model such as the Asus P7P55D Premium. The overall speed increase over a current gen SATA II drive just doesn’t justify building a rig around the Barracuda XT. While I would recommend the Seagate Barracuda XT for someone looking to buy NOW I would still caution waiting to see what SSD’s come to market in the near future as well as what models and platforms become available in time with more mature chipsets, we would love to see a 10k RPM SATA III drive. It is awesome to finally see some real progress being made on what is the slowest component in most consumers machines, the hard drive.
Overall the Seagate Barracude XT gives us a look at what SATA II promises to consumers from Seagate in future drives and what we can hopefully look forward to. You can expect to start seeing adoption of SATA III from HD and motherboard manufacturers by Q4 of 2010 with motherboard manufacturers already begining implimentation of chipsets supporting these drives. Hard Drive manufacturers will be a bit slower on the uptake due to the stock of SATA II drives already in the channel and the lack of demand from consumers at this point in time. We congratulate Seagate for being on the forefront of SATA III and pushing forward with technology that will speed up everyones computing experience. So the question remains “What is the status of the other hard drive manufacturers in SATA III and why have they been so quiet?”
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