Features:

  • Store games and play them faster with an internal SSHD drive delivering SSD performance and HDD capacities
  • Perfect for PC gaming, this hybrid hard drive helps load maps and boot levels faster with flash enhanced speeds
  • Choose from a variety of capacities for an optimized rig
  • Low power consumption means a more cost effective setup
  • Get long-term peace of mind with the included five-year limited warranty
Terrific Speed & Great Value

Just got this, and so far impressions are very positive. I have been able to attain read and write speeds of >200 MB/s on my Mac via Black Magic speed test (211.8 write and 213.3 read). Drive is quiet, quick and cool. We'll see how it holds up in the long term, but it has a 5 year warranty and at barely over a hundred bucks for such a high-performing platter drive (with 8 GB NAND), it's a terrific value. Fastest conventional hard disk I have used or seen. Recent data suggests Seagate reliability is improving, and to be honest, I have not personally seen a large number of Seagate failures among the many hard drives I've purchased and used for my own systems for many years, so I trust this brand. Seems like performance is better across the board against comparable WD drives, and prices generally comparable or lower.

Great Hybrid Drive for the Price, compared to standard HDD or a SSD with comparable storage space.

Love it! This was perfect for my storage needs. I wanted expanded storage to save my PC game installs to but did not want to shell out the cost of a high capacity SSD. This Seagate 2TB FireCuda Hybrid HDD/SSD, while not as fast as a straight SSD, still has read and write speeds well above those of standard HDD's. Using the Samsung Magician software that came with my Samsung 840 Pro SSD, I was able to record read and write speeds between my standard HDD and this new Seagate 2TB FireCude Hybrid HDD/SSD. Listed below are the results showing the average speed of both hard drives based on 6 performance benchmark test ran on each drive: Seagate 2TB FireCude 3.5-Inch HDD/SSD 6 Run Avg Results: Sequential Read(MB/s) - 94 MB/s Sequential Write(MB/s) - 163 MB/s Random Read(IOPS) - 591 MB/s Random Write(IOPS) - 1167 MB/s Seagate 1TB Barracuda 3.5-inch HDD 6 Run Avg Results: Sequential Read(MB/s) - 82 MB/s Sequential Write(MB/s) - 163 MB/s Random Read(IOPS) - 299 MB/s Random Write(IOPS) - 242 MB/s As the results show, the biggest performance increase comes with Random Read/Write Speeds with almost double the Random Read Speed and almost 5 times the Random Write Speed. Sequential Read speeds are marginally faster with the hybrid drive vs the normal HDD; however, the Hybrid drive Sequential Read speeds were showed that it could reach speeds as high as 140 MB/s. Where as, the HDD only produced a maximum of 90 MB/s during my testing. Sequential Write Speeds saw no gains of improvement between the Hybrid Drive and the Normal HDD in my testing. Results may vary... obviously, dependent on system specs. Overall, I would definitely recommend the FireCuda Hybrid HDD/SSD over a Normal HDD of comparable size. I've transferred many of my games from my HDD to my Hybrid drive and can definitely tell a difference in game load times. Let me also note that, the more you play/load a particular game or program, the faster the Hybrid drive is able to load it due to the 8GB of Flash Storage. Without the Flash Storage, a Normal HDD cannot compare. I will also recommend this to anyone that has been thinking about getting a larger SSD to install games to but are not quite ready to drop the amount of money it costs to get a SSD with a capacity of 1TB or higher.

Honestly Surprised

Bought this to replace a failing WD2003FZEX 2TB Black drive. Figured I'd try something a little different this time, and the benchmarks and reviews swayed me to this drive. I use it as a dedicated Game Installs drive and also do a lot of work with large amounts of small files. Modding and compiling my own projects with some particularly throughput heavy workflows. All the benchmarks I've run put this drive nearly in line with the(now failing) WD Black drive for raw performance. Never quite there but always at its heels. Of course the WD Black was more consistent and had higher overall throughput. But in practical usage, the Seagate FireCuda has been surprising. Level loads are much faster. Warping around in MMOs is so quick I can't read the loading screens. Initial loading of my 94GB Skyrim build is noticeably faster, and moving throughout Skyrim's world is more consistent. Streaming assets load more smoothly, and the loadscreens between areas are much shorter. Especially if you've been playing the game for a few hours. I wouldn't say there was a difference if it wasn't immediately noticeable. Raw performance might not be quite up to par with Barracuda Pros and WD Blacks, but practical usage definitely shows a different animal. Further, the FireCuda is MUCH MUCH quieter than the 2TB Black drive, has a roughly similar spinup time, and much better seek times. Accessing huge amounts of small texture files is at least as good in a worse case scenario, and much snappier than the Black drive when the FireCuda is in its stride. I imagine over the next few months it will build a thorough map of my usage patterns, and be a very consistent drive for me. This is my first Seagate for personal use in over a decade, and I must say I am impressed. Especially because it's a Hybrid drive. Long term longevity will be my real tell, but so far it does exactly what it says on the box. In my own real world usage this is every bit the drive the 2TB Black ever was, and CHEAPER. Great drive, at a GREAT price.

For use on the PS4 Pro and PS4 standard edition you can't beat these 2 TB Drives for capacity and reliability thus far!

Installed these in my PS4 systems. One PS4 Standard and one PS4 Pro. Sometimes the game play was a bit glitchy but I changed a few settings and things stabilized. The drives are quiet and did not require any special fussing with them before installation. If you know how to install drives in a PS4 you won't have any problem using these drives for a game storage upgrade. The price can't be beat and thus far quality of the drives are good. You can store a goodly amount of games on the system without worry.

Hybrid SSD

Bought this to replace the one that failed in my iMac. Hybrid hard drives are the way to go if you can't afford a real SSD. Get very close in speeds to an SSD with the more options for storage space with a fraction of the cost. Have put a few of the 3.5" hard drives in computers but have opted to put plenty of the 2.5" Hybrid SSD's in laptops. Haven't had any fail and they all work great.

Easily done and worth the money

This installed very easily in an aging Dell T1700. My computer had a 1TB and a 2TB. I was running out of space and wanted more zip, so I cloned the 1TB drive (which contained Windows and typical Program Files stuff) to this 2TB FireCuda. No issues at all during installation and cloning. Upon advice of others in these reviews, I restarted Windows a bunch of times and also loaded and exited Photoshop Elements and my browsers. I did this to tell Firecuda to cache those binary files in the SSD. After several rounds of this I found my system speeding up nicely. Not as fast as a pure SSD system, but quite a bit faster than it had done previously. So, for $99.00 I got an additional TB of disk and a faster computer. Not bad at all.

Boosts iMac boot times, responsive, quiet, reasonably priced!

My iMac 2010 27" i7's hard drive began to fail. Fortunately I had always kept Time Machine up to date. I opened my iMac, removed the old hard drive, dropped this one in, connected a third-party adapter to monitor the temperature (necessary to fit Seagate's configuration otherwise your fan computer fan will spin at max), closed up the iMac, booted up with Command-R, and let time machine install it's backup right onto the new drive (I may have had to prep the drive using Disk Utility but that took all of 5 minutes). Works like a charm! I opted for a 2TB version, my original drive was a 1TB, Time Machine had no problems making the transition. The Solid State portion is managed by the drive and while I honestly have no idea how it is utilized, I do notice a gain in processing speed and virtually zero lag time between processes.

Thought I was "downgrading" from SSD

I had my computer setup with five SSDs; trying to fit everything I wanted somewhere on them. I was frustrated with the setup and how disorganized it was. So I thought I would downgrade from my previous SSDs to two of these. The extra space is great. After the initial loading of data to say, start a game, the data loads at speeds as fast as my SSDs. However that first load is that of a regular 7200 rpm HD. After seeing these perform in my games, I was blown away. Not only did I now have ample space for new games but I also have the speed exactly where I needed it. They're great! As Tony the Tiger would say.

So far....

01-20-2019 So I just received this SSHD yesterday and have had a decent chance to run a few tests and just get a relatively good understanding of it. I will be coming back and updating this once I get a month under my belt with this drive in my PC. So far though it does have improved speeds over your standard HDD. Now I have seen a lot of people in their reviews say that this doesn't get anywhere close to the speeds of a real SSD, and my response to that and to anyone that is reading this review right now is... Of course, it isn't going to have the same speeds, it's not a full SSD, it's a hybrid drive people! So with that said, if you're looking for SSD speed then you need to go and look at true SSDs, not this Hybrid. Now, as I was saying before, I have seen improvements in both Read and Write speeds compared to my stock drive in my PC. The games that are loaded into this drive do see faster load times than in either my external or in my main drive. I will say that I have never been a huge fan of Seagate however, but I found this SSHD for a pretty good price so I decided to go ahead and try it out and so far it hasn't disappointed but we shall see if it can hold up to the expectations. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04-07-2019: Hey guys! Sorry it took so long to get this updated but I have been busy and just plain forgot about it. I have now had this drive in my PC for 3 months or so and I have to say, I find myself really enjoying it. It's quiet, low temps, and has some pretty good read/write speeds. Again, as I stated in my first review it's not on par with a true SSD because this is not a true SSD but it still hold higher speeds over your standard HDD. Overall, this was a good buy for me. I would totally say this is worth $100, but I wouldn't pay much more than that however.

Not at all a middle ground between a SSD and HDD, but a premium HDD.

Out of the box after being formatted I got 186 Seq Read speeds according to Crystal Disk Mark. This is definitely a step up from all the old 7200rpm 32mb cache Samsung F3 1Tb and WD Black 1tb Drives I bought back in 2010-2011 that pull in about 125 Sequential Read speeds. This drive still doesn't perform as well as the WD Black 5tb 128mb cache drive I have. I've never been overly impressed with these SSHD drives. These don't do that much to increase read and write speeds and they only work on frequently used programs. If these are on sale, they wouldn't be bad picks for a budget gaming PC. They boot the O.S. within reasonable times and they aren't that bad to work with. I see a lot of Gaming PC building forums where the people giving the advice act as if a SSD drive is a requirement. I have 10 computers. Some have a SSD, a couple have an M.2 NVMe SSD, one boots off a SSHD, and the rest have a standard 7200rpm drive. Boot and loading times aren't as bad as they're made out to be, especially if you actually have a good 7200rpm drive. A SSD will knock your socks off if you're new to a SSD but I've been using SSD's since 2010 and RAID 0 before that so the novelty has worn off. If you don't buy a junk drive that has low read and write speeds then you wont have a problem. This drive will be used as storage for a user that plans to put Office Pro 2016 on this drive.

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