From our experience, the majority of larger capacity drives have been generally slow and this has been one of the biggest reasons why people are still sticking to 2TB rather than moving onto 2.5 and 3TB. The other reason has been the limitation of many operating systems to utilize the full 3TB on the drives. Many 32-bit operating systems and older operating systems (Windows XP) have issues recognizing anything beyond 2.2TB on any drive over 2.2TB. Hard drive manufacturers have fumbled with this issue in the past and come up with hardware solutions to resolve the issue, while others have gone on a software route to resolve the problem. With Seagate, they decided to go with the less obtrusive software solution rather than the hardware one adopted by their competitor Western Digital.Today we will be evaluating the overall speed of the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB as well as how easy it is to make sure that we are getting the full 3TB out of the drive. Furthermore, since it is a 3TB drive we will be primarily using this drive in a data backup sort of usage scenario so things like boot time, etc will be insignificant.