Interestingly, the FireCuda Forge drives are external and sit 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 is located inside the FireCuda Forge, mounted inside an M.2 slot.
Everyone knows that storage prices have skyrocketed over the last year and a half, and FireCuda Forge adds a new aspect.
Seagate charges $699 for the 8TB drive and $899 for the 20TB model, and requires you to provide an internal PCIe Gen 3 M.2 SSD that is (thankfully) less than 1TB. The SSD itself should offer read/write speeds of 2400/2000 MB/s, and Seagate recommends that it include some form of RAM cache. Those are modest requirements as far as SSDs go; a Samsung 970 Evo Plus, for example, offers speeds of 3500/3300 MB/s.
seagate
The idea, however, is that Seagate’s hybrid drives offer read and write performance between a super expensive SSD and a slightly less expensive hard drive. Seagate rates the Alkemi/FireCuda Forge as having 2,500 MB/s read and 2,000 MB/s write performance, two orders of magnitude faster than the 190 MB/s transfer speed of an 8TB Seagate Barracuda hard drive, or the 210 MB/s of a Seagate IronWolf ST8000VN0004.
Still, you will have to pay for it. PCPartPicker tracks the price of 8TB 3.5-inch SATA hard drives, and the average price is about $380. Seagate’s 8TB FireCuda costs $699…plus the $299 Amazon charges for the 1TB SSD. Of course, you’re paying a premium for higher performance.
Seagate’s 8TB FireCuda Forge will end up costing around $1,000 total, but the performance difference between the generic hard drive and the Firecuda is substantial in favor of the latter.
