Seagate Technology LLC today started shipping a 6Gbit/sec serial ATA hard disk drive, which doubles the throughput of its previous high-end SATA drive.

The new 2TB hard drive is the first available drive that meets the SATA International Organization's SATA 3.0 specifications, Seagate said.

The new Barracuda XT (or model ST32000641AS) is a 3.5in, 7,200RPM desk top drive with 64MB of cache. It carries a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $299.

Initially, Seagate sees only a niche market for the drive, but said that by 2011, it expects that SATA 3.0 motherboards will be ubiquitous and that applications will require the drive's 6Gbit/sec bandwidth.

"In a sense, it's good Seagate's in the lead to bring this to market, but adoption is really going depend on the availability of 6Gbit/sec SATA on the host side," said John Rydning, research director for hard disk drives at IDC in Framingham, Mass.

Initially, Seagate said it expects the Barracuda XT to be used in high performance PCs, workstations, low cost servers with one to four drives. It will likely also be used early on in external storage systems.

The initial target audience is multimedia developers and high-performance gamers, Seagate said.

Seagate plans to demonstrate the drive at the Intel Developers Forum this week in San Francisco.