Seagate introduced the FireCuda Forge on November 10, an external desktop drive that pairs a hard drive with an NVMe SSD the buyer supplies and uses the SSD as a cache, according to its press release. It is on sale from the Seagate store and partners in 8TB and 20TB versions starting at $699 and $899, and the SSD is not included.
The computer sees one volume, and the SSD adds speed but no capacity
Seagate says its Alkemi technology learns how data is used and keeps frequently accessed content on the SSD, while the hard drive holds the larger library. The blog post adds that the SSD’s capacity is not added to the volume, which is sized by the hard drive alone. A buyer who fits a large SSD therefore likely pays for speed and gains no extra space.
USB4 and up to 2,500MB/s reads, with Windows 11 and macOS 26 as the supported systems
The drive connects over USB4. Its read and write speeds are given only as maximums, and no test method appears. Seagate lists Windows 11 and macOS 26 and above as the designed platforms. The hard drive is upgradeable.
A 90% cache hit rate comes from Seagate’s own gaming traces of 4.3 million requests
For the blog post, Seagate recorded block-level I/O traces of gaming workloads and tested its cache across sessions representing 4.3 million I/O requests, where the cache achieved a 90% hit rate. The figure covers gaming only and is Seagate’s own, and a single modern game can fill 100 GB to 200 GB, so the number may say little about the first launch of a new game.
The price works out to about $87 a terabyte on the 8TB model and $45 on the 20TB
At those prices the 8TB model could be read as about $87 per terabyte and the 20TB model as about $45, before the cost of the SSD that each needs. Seagate appears to give no speed for the hard drive on its own, so what a cache miss costs in practice is not stated.