<span class="content"> <p><font size="2">Seagate has finally started shipping their new Barracuda XT 2TB drives that feature the new 6Gb/s SATA interface based on SATA Revision 3.x specifications. We had an early preview of the drive a few weeks ago and finally received a production level item for review. Just as important, we now have retail motherboards from Asus and Gigabyte featuring 6Gb/s capabilities. Well at least the Marvell 88SE9123 chipset included on both motherboards is theoretically capable of 6Gb/s operation. </font></p> <p><font size="2">Asus and Gigabyte took a different approach to implementing the Marvell 9123 chipset on their motherboards. Asus&rsquo;s top of the line P7P55D Premium (a very good board by the way, full review coming shortly) features a PEX PLX8613 PCIe bridge chip that will convert four of the P55&rsquo;s PCIe x1 lanes (250MB/s each) into two 500MB/s lanes. While still short of the maximum theoretical 600MB/s transfer speed of the SATA 6G specifications, it will provide more than enough burst bandwidth for the first generation 6G hard drives. The benefit is that the 6G capability is always on without affecting the other capabilities of the board and the same PLX chipset will be utilized for the upcoming USB 3.0 (NEC chipset) option on their upper-end boards. </font></p> <p><font size="2">Gigabyte&rsquo;s implementation will be utilizing an x8 PCIe 2.0 from the Lynnfield processor that will obviously provide more than enough bandwidth but the drawback is that CF/SLI capabilities will be disabled as only a single x8 PCIe 2.0 lane will be available to the GPU. The benefit in this approach is that the SATA 6G switch is disabled/enabled in the BIOS by the user based upon need. Since an additional hardware chipset like Asus is utilizing is not required, it should result in a slightly lower board cost. Gigabyte informed us this week that all P55A-xxx boards will feature both SATA 6G and USB 3.0 capabilities. We will compare the performance of Gigabyte&rsquo;s solution against Asus&rsquo; implementation shortly. </font></p> <p><font size="2">For today&rsquo;s preview we are utilizing the Asus P7P55D Premium motherboard, 8GB of GSkill&rsquo;s DDR3-1600 Ripjaw memory, Asus HD5870 video card, Corsair 750HX power supply, Windows 7 x64 RTM, Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB HD, WD VelociRaptor 300GB, Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD, and Seagate&rsquo;s Barracuda XT 2TB HD. We will have a full review of both hard drives shortly with additional performance results along with temperature and noise tests.</font></p> <p><font size="2">We are utilizing the Intel 160GB SSD for our OS drive and comparing the Seagate XT drive to its closest competitor, the WD Caviar Black, on both the Intel P55 and Marvell 9123 controllers. The P55 is limited to SATA 3Gb/s operational mode when running either drive, while the Marvell controller will be operated in SATA 6Gb/s mode with the Seagate drive and in fallback 3Gb/s mode with the WD drive. We are utilizing Marvell&rsquo;s latest 1027 driver and Intel&rsquo;s 7.0.0.1013 driver set in AHCI mode.&nbsp;<br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3668">Read more...</a></font></p> </span>