jmke

The long awaited Sata 3 interface is finally here. The new interface promises to offer twice the bandwidth of the older Sata 2 interface. Currently hard drives don't challenge the Sata 2 bandwidth unless your talking Raid arrays. More than likely SSD Raid arrays. Seagate estimates that within 2 - 3 years we will need the additional bandwidth that Sata 3 offers but the fledgling technology is here now.

We have the flagship Gigabyte P55A-UD6 with Sata 3 and USB 3.0 and a Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB drive to spin up on the new interface. You should be aware though that this is just a speed bump drive and it's not going to challenge the bandwidth of Sata 3. It has the Sata 3 interface and is backwards compatible with Sata 2, but it's not going to exceed Sata 2 theoretical bandwidth speeds.

That's not to say the Barracuda XT is a bad drive or anything of that nature, it's a very good drive, one of the best 7200 RPM drives we've ever seen and it has a whopping big 64MB cache. There's a lot to like about the Seagate Barracuda XT, but it's still not going to exceed 300MB/s which is the Sata 2 theoretical limit. One of the things we like about Seagate is they are very open and let you know right up front what to expect.

http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1732

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