Seagate has now began shipping its 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive. The highest capacity hard drive is rare in supporting legacy operating systems such as Windows XP, which can’t support hard drive capacities higher than 2.1TB.without special sofeware. DiscWizard software that’s available for download ships with the drive and lets the system read and write to, though not boot from, the extra-large drive.
Windows Vista and 7 users, as well as many Mac users, can see the full capacity without software. Booting needs EFI firmware that isn’t present on most Windows PCs but which should work with newer Macs.
The Barracuda XT sports a 64MB cache along with a SATA 6Gbps interface to help it accommodate burst speeds. The 3.5-inch hard drive spins at up to 7,200RPM, and allows for an 8.5ms random read seek time. It produces a maximum of 32dB of noise and should be useful for most quiet systems.
Pricing has not been disclosed yet.
