Seagate's 20TB FireCuda Forge Blends SSD Speed With HDD Capacity For Gamers

For a long time, the idea of keeping games on external storage basically came along with the assumption that you would copy them back to the internal storage when you intended to play them. That all changed with the advent of UASP, allowing USB drives to reach SATA-like access speeds. Now, it's quite common to keep games on external storage, but HDDs are still slower than NVMe SSDs. Seagate says nuts to that with its FireCuda Forge external HDDs, which use an M.2 SSD for dynamic caching to maintain PCIe SSD speeds from a USB HDD.

Seagate describes the dynamic caching technology as "Alkemi." Incredibly, Seagate doesn't actually claim that Alkemi is AI-powered. Instead, it seems to be a fancy name for an algorithm that "learns and adapts over time" to understand which data it should keep on the SSD versus which data it can leave on the internal hard disk drive. Thanks to the cache drive and a USB4 interface, Seagate says the FireCuda Forge is capable of up to 2,500MB/s on reads and 2,000MB/s on writes.


The hard drive itself is actually upgradeable, it seems, though the SSD isn't included so a lot of what you're paying for is the enclosure that supports the smart caching technology. That technology appears to run on the enclosure itself, although Seagate doesn't actually make that explicit. Note that the M.2 2280 NVMe SSD required for the drive must be PCIe Gen3 or higher, but a maximum of 1TB in capacity; Seagate recommends using a drive with a DRAM cache.

It's a fascinating time to launch a new hard drive product for consumers, as HDDs are nearly as scarce on the ground as DDR5 memory. That's probably why the pricing on these drives is so extravagant; the official pricing for the 8TB model is $699, while the 20TB version is marked for $899. We found the 20TB version available for preorder at MSRP, but the 8TB version is marked up a bit from the recommended price, to the point that the 20TB version looks like a much better deal.