Seagate wants to turbocharge the hard drive, with a big, pricy catch
Interestingly, the FireCuda Forge drives are external, sitting on your desk. (They measure 9.5 x 5.8 x 2.6 inches and weigh over 4 pounds.) It connects via a USB4 (Thunderbolt) cable to your PC. The SSD lives inside the FireCuda Forge, mounted inside an M.2 slot.
Everyone knows that storage prices have shot up over the last year and a half, and the FireCuda Forge adds a new wrinkle.
Seagate is charging $699 for the 8TB drive and $899 for the 20TB model, and requires that you supply a PCIe Gen 3 M.2 internal SSD that’s (fortunately) less than 1TB. The SSD itself needs to deliver 2,400/2,000MB/s read/write speeds, and Seagate recommends that it include some sort of a RAM cache itself. Those are modest requirements as SSDs go; a Samsung 970 Evo Plus, for example, delivers 3,500/3,300MB/s speeds.
Seagate
The idea, however, is that Seagate’s hybrid drives deliver read and write performance somewhere between a super-pricy SSD and a somewhat less expensive hard drive. Seagate rates the Alkemi/FireCuda Forge as delivering 2,500MB/s read and 2,000MB/s write performance, two orders of magnitude higher than the 190MB/s transfer rate of a Seagate Barracuda 8TB hard drive, or the 210MB/s of a Seagate IronWolf ST8000VN0004.
Still, you’ll need to pay for it. PCPartPicker tracks the price of 8TB 3.5-inch SATA hard drives, and the average price is about $380 or so. Seagate’s 8TB FireCuda is $699…plus the $299 that Amazon charges for the 1TB SSD. You’re paying a premium for more performance, of course.
Seagate’s 8TB FireCuda Forge will end up at about $1,000 all in — but the performance difference between the generic hard drive and the Firecuda is substantial in the latter’s favor.
