2TB 7200RPM HDD roundup

The manufacturers having achieved a stable operation of a pack of 500GB platters, 4-platter HDDs rushed to the market. All of the makers, excluding Samsung which is not yet ready to produce a 4-platter desktop HDD, have decided that a large HDD needs a large cache buffer. The amount of 64 megabytes of cache memory, first implemented by WD in its WD2002FYPS, has become a de-facto standard as all new-generation HDDs are equipped with it. Seagate even went further and equipped its Barracuda XT with a SATA 6Gbps controller. Sounds nice, but there are very few mainboards available that support the new SATA specification as yet. Moreover, the speed of reading from platters has not yet even approached the peak bandwidth of the SATA 3Gbps standard. So, we don’t quite get Seagate’s point. Is it an attempt to outperform its opponents or a purely marketing move? Western Digital, on its part, does not hurry with the interface. Let’s see whose approach proves to be better.