The World's First 3TB HDD: Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB Review

3TB Internal Drive Performance - Nothing to Get Excited About Yet

To hit 3TB Seagate had to increase the areal density of the Barracuda XT’s platters. If the 3TB drive uses 5 platters that’s 600GB per platter, up from 500GB in the 2TB version. Note that the internal Barracuda XT will most likely have a 64MB DRAM cache and other tweaks to make it more of a performer. This comparison is only useful for those folks trying to get an early jump on the internal 3TB bandwagon:

You’ll note that random performance isn’t really much better and sequential performance is actually down from the 2TB drive due in part to the fact that we've got a smaller cache and generally less performance optimized drive with this external 3TB unit compared to the 2TB internal drive. Over USB 3.0 we actually get much better sequential performance apparently due to some additional buffering done by the USB 3 controller.

The bottom line: when internal versions of the 3TB drives ship, don’t expect them to perform much differently from the 2TB drives we have today.