Editor’s opinion: Hybrid drives were all the rage among storage manufacturers a little over a decade ago. Seagate believes that today’s chaotic hardware landscape is ripe for further exploitation, which is why the company is now offering an extra expensive new device that aims to revitalize the entire hybrid propulsion concept.
Seagate has introduced the FireCuda Forge, an external “desktop” hard drive that aims to achieve NVMe-class data rates by embedding a smaller SSD in the same housing. Just like classic hybrid drives, FireCuda Forge can store frequently used data in a much faster solid-state cache. However, unlike these older designs, the SSD is not included and must be provided by the user.
FireCuda Forge is currently available in 8TB and 20TB capacities, priced at $699 and $899, respectively. The external hard drive houses an “unused” slot for a user-supplied M.2 SSD, with Seagate limiting the usable cache to 1TB, further increasing the overhead for the improved data rates the device claims to achieve.
FireCuda Forge includes Alkemi, an entirely new I/O management technology developed by Seagate to realize this hybrid propulsion concept. The storage giant explained that Alkemi uses an FPGA chip and an embedded Linux operating system to manage the solid-state cache. The system constantly monitors the file access workload so it can decide which data to prioritize and copy to the faster SSD.
Alkemi is said to be able to adapt to each user’s needs and employ optimized caching policies to achieve higher cache hit rates. FireCuda Forge is designed primarily as a gaming storage drive, with Seagate testing multiple gaming sessions with 4.3 million I/O requests. Overall, Alkemi achieved a cache hit rate of 90%.
The new hybrid drive behaves like a single storage unit, meaning the host operating system only “sees” one drive. This simplifies data management, but also poses a potential reliability risk if an error occurs in the SSD cache or HDD portion of the drive.
On paper, a fully populated FireCuda Forge should deliver high bandwidth throughput for gaming and recording workloads with speeds of up to 2,500 MB/s read and 2,000 MB/s write over USB4. The external drive is compatible with M.2 2280, PCIe Gen3 or newer SSDs, while official operating system support includes Windows 11 and macOS 26.
FireCuda Forge’s high price is likely to hurt the device’s popularity, and prices are unlikely to improve any time soon. Just like the other few surviving hard drive makers, Seagate is now seeing a massive increase in revenue thanks to growing demand from AI data centers.
