Seagate has announced the world's first SATA 3.0 hard drive, the Barracuda XT.
It's the world's fastest 'mainstream' hard drive, and can feed data to a SATA 3.0 interface at burst throughputs up to the 6Gbit/s maximum, twice what is theoretically possible from today's SATA 2.0 hardware.
"Our aim is not to compromise on performance or capacity," says Seagate senior VP for global disc storage operations David Mosley. Today, higher capacity drives inevitably struggle to deliver larger and larger amounts of data to users relative to the capability of the interface.
Mosley says the XT wasn't designed to be used in high-vibration and high heat situations that would be common in a datacentres, hence its 'mainstream' PC placement.