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Seagate resurrects hybrid storage: Hands-on with the FireCuda Forge – 8 or 20TB external hard drive requires you to bring your own NVMe SSD

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Seagate resurrects hybrid storage: Hands-on with the FireCuda Forge – 8 or 20TB external hard drive requires you to bring your own NVMe SSD

What's old is new again. Seagate started adding faster flash-based storage to its hard drives in 2010, when solid-state storage was prohibitively expensive. And now that SSDs are stupid-expensive again (thanks, AI hyperscaler demand) the hard drive maker is offering up another hybrid drive, of sorts, with the Firecuda Forge.

Available in 8TB and 20TB capacities, the Forge is an external hard drive that requires that you bring and install your own SSD. That's right, the drive won't work unless you partially disassemble and install your own M.2 2280 SSD, which mounts in the side of the enclosure. 1TB drives with DRAM are recommended. Performance maxes out at PCIe Gen3 drives; newer, faster, and roomier SSDs are supported, but won't improve performance. The Firecuda Forge only has a mounting point for 2280-length drives, and while drives that are less than 1TB are supported, that means less room for frequently used files, so "performance may be reduced."

Interestingly, Seagate sent us a 2TB FireCuda 530R SSD to test with the Forge hard drive, which is both faster (PCIe 4.0) and more spacious than what the company says you should pair with its hard drive. The list of SSD that Seagate has officially qualified to work with the Firecuda Forge is also pretty sparse, including just three other drives: Samsung's 990 Pro, WD/Sandisk SN850X/GX Pro 850X, and the WD/SanDisk SN710/GX7100.

We only received a review sample a few days before launch, and haven't yet had a chance to put the FireCuda Forge through its paces for a full review.


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