Seagate resurrects hybrid storage: Hands-on with the FireCuda Forge – 8 or 20TB external hard drive requires you to bring your own NVMe SSD
Seagate takes on high SSD storage prices with the Firecuda Force, a 8TB or 20TB hard drive that requires you to bring your own M.2 2280 SSD (ideally 1TB, with DRAM). It's a throwback to the days of hybrid drives, and the experience is pretty seamless once you install your SSD. But if you don't already own an SSD that you can drop in, it's still quite expensive.
Seagate has reintroduced hybrid storage technology with the FireCuda Forge, an external hard drive that requires users to install their own NVMe SSD. Available in 8TB and 20TB capacities, the Forge is designed to work with 1TB drives featuring DRAM, and its performance peaks at PCIe Gen3 drives. Seagate recommends using its own 2TB FireCuda 530R SSD, which outperforms the company's recommended SSDs in terms of speed and capacity.
The FireCuda Forge connects via USB-C and includes onboard processing to combine spinning platter drive data with the user-supplied SSD, a technology Seagate calls Alkemi. This on-device device dynamic caching and workload-aware data-prioritization system adapts to user behavior over time. While the process of installing the additional SSD can be slightly cumbersome, the FireCuda Forge offers a significant boost in performance compared to traditional hard drives, with preliminary testing showing read and write speeds up to 2,500 MB/s and 2,000 MB/s, respectively.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
