Seagate's Firecuda SSHD is a great replacement for traditional hard drives in your PC

Seagate Firecuda

Traditionally, PC storage is split betwixt the fast and expensive SSD and the super slow but very affordable HDD complete with magnetic record and needle. The latter is adequately aboriginal engineering nowadays when it comes to PCs and with SSDs continually getting cheaper it'south easier than ever to ignore the big old magnetic drives.

Only, there are still places for such engineering science. By and large when it comes to mass storage because they offer much meliorate value per GB. But there's as well a 3rd style: The SSHD, likewise known equally a hybrid drive. This combines a minor amount of NAND flash storage, such as y'all'd find in a regular SSD, with the regular HDD style magnetic tape.

The idea is fairly unproblematic: combine the speed benefits of SSDs with the mass volume of HDDs. The controller in the drive volition decide what lives where, caching your virtually used information on the NAND, simply ultimately a hybrid will exist faster than a standard HDD.

So I grabbed a Seagate Firecuda 1TB SSHD to run across what it's all nigh.

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Seagate Firecuda SSHD hardware and performance

Seagate Firecuda

Firstly, some quick specs.

Category	Spec
Capacity	500GB, 1TB, 2TB 2.five-inch drive
Interface	SATA 6Gb/due south
Sequential read	Up to 140MB/s
Sequential write	Upwards to 140MB/s
Avg power consumption	i.8W
Durability	600,000 load/reload cycles
Warranty	5 years

It's besides important to notation that Seagate employs Multi-tier Caching Technology (MTC) to utilize NAND flash, DRAM and media caching technologies to further squeeze the virtually from the bulldoze.

I of the target audiences the Firecuda is pushed at is gamers, folks who want faster loading times than their huge HDDs just without sacrificing capacity. Gamers are also the type of user that will transfer large files once and so get out them at that place, which is an ideal condition for best performance from an SSHD.

Full general file transfers to the mass storage on the bulldoze however chug along the same as they would on a regular HDD. But in benchmarks, it's a little clearer to see some of that operation gain.

In both CrystalDiskMark and ATTO, the Firecuda about matches Seagate's claimed sequential read/write maximums. I've tried this bulldoze in a secondary workstation which currently houses a small Kingston SSD every bit a kick drive.

In both sets of images, the Firecuda is on the left and the Kingston SSD on the correct. The Firecuda easily beats the big old HDD in the aforementioned system in benchmarks, but it'southward interesting to see how it compares to an affordable SSD.

The Firecuda is actually around 1/three of the benchmarked performance of the SSD in sequential tests, which is hands ameliorate than I expected. Considering the toll between the 2, there's a example to be made for the SSHD.

Seagate Firecuda SSHD: Should y'all buy one?

I'm non about to advocate everyone run out and buy one of these. But there's still reason to. To be articulate, whatsoever SSD volition be faster than this, and for even budget systems you'll have much faster loading and file transfer times on even an affordable SSD.

But here's the kicker. The 1TB Samsung 860 Evo SSD I previously reviewed costs $278. The 1TB Firecuda SSHD costs $60. In any system, y'all can save some serious money by combining something like this with a small SSD to boot Windows and your central apps from. Overall performance will be slower, only y'all tin get chapters on a budget.

The price has always been the well-nigh attractive thing about using an HDD in a PC. Combined with an SSD boot drive you get a mixture of mass storage, affordability, and performance. Seagate'due south own Barracuda 1TB 2.5-inch HDD is only almost $14 cheaper than the Firecuda, and honestly, that's $fourteen well spent getting i of these.

Exist it a laptop or a desktop, if you're hunting for high-capacity mass storage without the price premium of an SSD, a Firecuda SSHD is worth it.

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