Seagate began shipping the 2TB Barracuda XT hard drive today. The $299 drive costs more than other 2TB drives currently on the market, so there must be something special about it. The Barracuda XT operates on the next generation SATA platform, with speeds up to 6Gb/s, which translates to 768MB/s. This puts the drive much closer to the levels currently being attained by SSDs. However, users will need a motherboard that supports this new standard to take advantage of these speeds. The good news is that it is backwards compatible with the current SATA specification.