Seagate unveils alternative drive for gaming market

Seagate has extended its Barracuda line of desktop storage drives with the introduction of its Barracuda XT product.

David Burks, product marketing director at Seagate, said the hard disc drive and storage vendor created Barracuda XT to provide its existing customers and partners with an alternative in the growing high performance desktop computing market.

"The 3.5-inch desktop storage market is expected to grow between three to five per cent this quarter and four per cent in Q4 '09," Burks said. "This is based on forecasts from external analysts and our own knowledge of the market."

The company, he said, wanted to provide more segmentation in the market and thus, has released Barracuda XT for the high performance space. The Barracuda line also includes the Barracuda LP, which is designed for low power-focused applications, the Barracuda 7200 drives, for mainstream desktop computing, and now, the Barracuda XT drives.

With more content being stored on computers such as video, multimedia content, HD music and photography, Burks said Seagate wanted to address the needs of users who wanted maximum capacity and performance.

Barracuda XT is ideal for users in the multimedia, high performance gaming and high performance external storage spaces, Burks said. The 3.5-inch, four-disk platform drive is built on a 7200RPM (revolutions per minute) platform, features 2TB of storage capacity, 64MB of cache and also has a Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gbit/s (gigabit per second) interface.

For the partner community, Burks said system builders can use Barracuda XT to build "higher performance systems that will help them stand out in the crowd in this high performance category."

The Barracuda XT uses Seagate's perpendicular magnetic recording technology, which is also used in its other Barracuda drives. This technology allows the drive to have increased storage capacity by storing data bits vertically, instead of horizontally.

Burks said partners can also leverage Seagate's SeaTools software when selling the drives to their customers.

"SeaTools software is our free tool on our Web site," Burks said. "This software lets users tune their systems even more to get better performance. Partners can leverage this to more effectively communicate a value proposition to their customers."

The Seagate Barracuda XT desktop drive is now shipping and the MSP is listed at US$299. Seagate's priority now is to "build awareness" of the Barracuda line and to also let partners and customers know about the availability of the product, Burks said.

"We're working with our sales force and partners now to really get the word out there," he added. "We're trying to give customers a good choice of desktop drives to suit the needs of all market segments.

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