Seaec Firecuda SSHD is an excellent replacement for traditional hard drives in your PC

Traditionally, PC storage is divided between the fast and expensive SSD and the super slow but very affordable hard drive with magnetic stripe and needle. The latter is a fairly old technology nowadays with regard to PCs and SSD disks being less and less expensive, it is easier than ever to ignore the big old magnetic disks.

But there are still places for this technology. Especially when it comes to mass storage because they offer a much better value per GB. But there is also a third way: the SSHD, also known as the hybrid drive. This combines a small amount of NAND flash storage, as you would with a standard SSD, with the classic HDD type magnetic tape.

The idea is quite simple: combine the speed advantages of SSDs with the mass volume of hard drives. The disk controller will decide where it will cache the most used data on the NAND, but eventually a hybrid will be faster than a standard hard drive.

So I took a Seagate Firecuda 1TB SSHD to see what it's all about.

See on Amazon

Seagate Firecuda SSHD Material and Performance

First, some quick specs.

It is also important to note that Seagate uses Multilevel Caching Technology (MTC) to utilize NAND flash memory, DRAM, and media caching technologies for better get the most out of the drive.

The target audience for Firecuda is gamers, people who want faster loading times than their huge hard drives, but without sacrificing their capacity. Players are also the type of user who will transfer big files once and then leave them there, which is an ideal condition for better performance of an SSHD.

General file transfers to mass storage on disk would be on a regular hard drive. But in the benchmarks, it's a bit clearer to see some of that performance gain.

In CrystalDiskMark and ATTO, Firecuda talks about Seagate's sequential read / write reads. I've tried this drive in a secondary workstation that currently hosts a small Kingston SSD drive as a boot disk.

In both sets of images, the Firecuda is on the left and the Kingston SSD on the right. The Firecuda easily beats the big old hard drive in the same system in benchmarks, but it's interesting to see how it compares to an affordable SSD.

The Firecuda is actually about 1/3 of SSD performance in sequential tests, which is easily better than I expected. Considering the price between the two, there is a case to be made for the SSHD.

Seagate Firecuda SSHD: Should you buy one?

I am not about to recommend to everyone to buy one. But there are still reasons to do it. To be clear, any SSD will be faster than that, and even for budget systems, you'll have much faster file loading and transfer times even on an affordable SSD.

But here is the kicker. The 1TB Samsung 860 Evo SSD that I have previously reviewed costs $ 278. The 1TB Firecuda SSHD costs $ 60. In any system, you can save money by combining something like this with a small SSD to boot Windows and your key applications. Overall performance will be slower, but you can get capacity on a budget.

The price has always been the most interesting thing about using a hard drive in a PC. Combined with a SSD boot drive, you get a mix of mass storage, affordability and performance. Seagate's 2.5-inch Barracuda 1TB hard drive costs about $ 14 less than the Firecuda, and honestly, it's $ 14 well spent to get one.

Whether it is a laptop or a desktop storage without the premium of a SSD, a Firecuda SSHD is worth it

View on Amazon