500gb Seagate 25 Firecuda Flash-accelerated Hard Drive Review

Traditionally, PC storage is split betwixt the fast and expensive SSD and the super slow only very affordable HDD complete with magnetic record and needle. The latter is fairly ancient technology present when it comes to PCs and with SSDs continually getting cheaper information technology'due south easier than ever to ignore the large old magnetic drives.

Merely, there are still places for such engineering. Mostly when it comes to mass storage considering they offering much improve value per GB. But at that place's too a third way: The SSHD, also known as a hybrid drive. This combines a small amount of NAND wink storage, such as you'd discover in a regular SSD, with the regular HDD style magnetic record.

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

And then I grabbed a Seagate Firecuda 1TB SSHD to see what it'southward all about.

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Seagate Firecuda SSHD hardware and performance

Firstly, some quick specs.

Category	Spec
Capacity	500GB, 1TB, 2TB ii.five-inch drive
Interface	SATA 6Gb/due south
Sequential read	Upward to 140MB/s
Sequential write	Up to 140MB/s
Avg power consumption	1.8W
Durability	600,000 load/reload cycles
Warranty	Five years

It'south also important to note that Seagate employs Multi-tier Caching Engineering (MTC) to utilize NAND flash, DRAM and media caching technologies to farther squeeze the most from the drive.

One of the target audiences the Firecuda is pushed at is gamers, folks who desire faster loading times than their huge HDDs but without sacrificing capacity. Gamers are also the type of user that will transfer large files in one case then leave them there, which is an platonic condition for best performance from an SSHD.

General file transfers to the mass storage on the bulldoze notwithstanding chug along the same as they would on a regular HDD. Simply in benchmarks, it's a piffling clearer to see some of that operation proceeds.

In both CrystalDiskMark and ATTO, the Firecuda about matches Seagate'due south claimed sequential read/write maximums. I've tried this drive in a secondary workstation which currently houses a pocket-size Kingston SSD as a kick drive.

In both sets of images, the Firecuda is on the left and the Kingston SSD on the right. The Firecuda hands beats the large erstwhile HDD in the aforementioned system in benchmarks, but information technology'due south interesting to run across how it compares to an affordable SSD.

The Firecuda is really around 1/3 of the benchmarked performance of the SSD in sequential tests, which is easily meliorate than I expected. Considering the price between the two, there's a case to exist made for the SSHD.

Seagate Firecuda SSHD: Should you buy ane?

I'm not nearly to abet everyone run out and buy one of these. But there's nevertheless reason to. To exist clear, any SSD will be faster than this, and for even upkeep systems y'all'll have much faster loading and file transfer times on even an affordable SSD.

But hither'southward the kicker. The 1TB Samsung 860 Evo SSD I previously reviewed costs $278. The 1TB Firecuda SSHD costs $60. In any system, you tin can save some serious money by combining something like this with a small SSD to boot Windows and your central apps from. Overall functioning will be slower, only yous can become capacity on a budget.

The price has always been the most attractive affair about using an HDD in a PC. Combined with an SSD boot drive you get a mixture of mass storage, affordability, and performance. Seagate's own Barracuda 1TB 2.v-inch HDD is only about $14 cheaper than the Firecuda, and honestly, that's $14 well spent getting one of these.

Be 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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Buyer'southward guide

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Source: https://www.windowscentral.com/seagate-firecuda-sshd-review

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