Seagate today began global shipments of the largest-capacity mainstream desktop hard drive - Barracuda XT, a 7200RPM product featuring 2TB of storage capacity and a blazing fast Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second interface.

The 3.5-inch desktop drive is the industry?s first to feature a SATA 6Gb/s interface.

The Barracuda XT product, a four-platter drive featuring an areal density of 368 Gigabits per square inch, delivers the highest performance - burst speeds of up to 6 Gigabits per second ? for all PC applications, maintains backward compatibility with the SATA 3Gb/second and SATA 1.5Gb/second interfaces, and uses the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration.

"Marvell is pleased to be announcing the industry's first commercially available SATA 6Gb/s solution and working with Seagate to introduce this technology," said Dr. Alan J. Armstrong, vice president of Marketing, Business Storage Group at Marvell.

With Barracuda XT drives and SATA 6Gb/s motherboards from ASUS and Gigabyte, computer makers can build the highest-performance PCs, workstations and entry-level servers. ASUS was first to market with a SATA 6Gb/s motherboard; the company?s P7P55D Premium began shipping in August. The new GIGABYTE P55 series GA-P55-Extreme motherboards are also now shipping .

Seagate will demonstrate SATA 6Gb/s technology with technology partners at the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) booth, #425, at IDF, September 22 - 24 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.