Cayman hard drive maker Seagate has announced its first SATA 6Gb/s drive, the Barracuda XT.

The 7200rpm drive boasts 64MB of cache, and Seagate claims 32MB is simply not enough to SATA 6Gb/s speeds. The high rotational speed, plentiful cache and the latest SATA tech should make the XT quite a performer, and Seagate hopes it will set a new standard in its class.

Sadly, all this is relatively pointless at the moment, as you simply can't get motherboards which can harness its full potential. Even the few motherboards that do offer SATA 6 support on paper can't deliver full SATA 6 performance.

We will probably have to wait until early 2010 before we see proper implementation in new Intel and AMD motherboards.