For the early adopters of the new SATA technology there will not be an immediate and dramatic across the board performance change. I asked if we will see any faster boot time with SATA 6G and was told that it has not been tested, and at this point there may be a minimal performance gain with OS boot time. However with the 64MB of cache memory, all cache operations will see a better burst performance and will reduce data throughput bottlenecks. SATA 6G is backward compatible with legacy SATA hardware without the need to use a jumper.

The new Barracuda XT series is aimed at multimedia creation, high performance computers, low cost servers, and external storage. Early testing shows a 47% performance improvement over standard Barracuda drives with non-linear video editing. Other intense computing may see some quicker responses to disk operations, but if you are looking to 'overclock' your hard drive then you will see a good performance increase (although you will lose some capacity). I did hear about this, but have not tested it yet myself, but Techwarelabs.com has a good article with its Seagate 1.5TB Mod Tutorial. Seagate will be launching some How-To articles on their SeaTools application to show how to use the program to tune the hard drive for capacity or performance.

Until eSATA is available at 6 Gb/s I don't see any improvements that make upgrading to an XT external drive beneficial immediately. Although if you are planning for the future, SATA 6G will be in its prime in about 2-3 years; application optimization, controller, driver, and OS optimization, and areal density and other pending HDD technology will combine to push performance higher.

There are a few motherboards coming out that support SATA 6G, including the ASUS P7P55D Premium which has some preview information released on the Internet. From what I can see, it has two SATA 6G ports, and no eSATA ports. Based on the past history with SATA 1.5Gb/s & 3 Gb/s, SATA 6 Gb/s will be required in 2011.

The Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB SATA 6G Hard Drive has a ship date of September 21, 2009 and an MSRP of $299. It's a bit more expensive than the Barracuda LP 2TB drive I recently reviewed, but it is the future and does boast more speed and cache, as well as the Seagate 5 year warranty.