Most enthusiasts will favor SSDs for their main boot drive rather than a mechanical hard drive thanks to the vast performance benefits available. However, there is still a large market for high performance mechanical drives which offer a much larger capacity for storage of large files. Today we are going to look at the latest Barracuda hard drive from Seagate, which offers no less than 3 TB of storage space.

It uses the same Advanced Format technology as the Seagate Barracuda Green 2 TB hard drive that we reviewed in detail here. This technology enables the manufacturer to cram more sectors onto each drive platter, thereby increasing the capacity of each platter. This, in turn, allows them to make higher capacity drives.

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Figure 1: Seagate Barracuda 3 TB (top)

The Seagate Barracuda 3 TB uses a SATA-600 interface so the performance of the hard drive won’t be limited providing you connect it to the SATA-600 port on your motherboard. The drive has a real capacity of 2,794 GB (read our “Hard Disk Drive Capacity Limits” tutorial to understand why), which should provide more than enough space for all your files. The large capacity of this drive makes it perfect for those with a big media library or those looking to build a home server.

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Figure 2: Seagate Barracuda 3 TB (bottom)

Despite the high capacity, the Barracuda 3 TB looks identical aesthetically to any other hard drive occupying a 3.5” form factor. In fact, the Advanced Format technology means that there are fewer platters employed within the hard drive than a lot of lower capacity drives.

In our tests, we will be comparing the Seagate Barracuda 3 TB to some alternative drives to give us an idea of how the performance compares. We will be using the Seagate Barracuda LP Green 2 TB and Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB for comparison. In the table below, we will compare the basic specifications of these products.

* All prices were researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review.