Seagate FireCuda 2TB 2.5″ SSHD Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Seagate FireCuda 2.5″ 2TB SSHD can be found at Amazon UK for £103.05 and Amazon US for $109.79 at the time of writing.

Conclusion

Hybrid drives such as the Seagate FireCuda 2TB 2.5-inch SSHD can be tricky drives to review. Traditional benchmarks won’t really show their strengths and that might be why a lot of reviewers don’t touch them. While it is tricky, it is possible if you know how the drives actually work.

An SSHD isn’t an overall faster drive such as an SSD is in comparison to a HDD. It will be faster at everything, but at a cost and a capacity sacrifice. That’s where the SSHD-class drives come into play. Standard operations such as copying of files and folders won’t be any faster than a HDD of the same size and spindle speed, and that’s what traditional benchmark apps such as ATTO, AS SSD, and CDM show us. The FireCuda is a great drive here too and right on par with other 2.5-inch hard disks.

The strength of the SSHD drives is when it comes to repetitive loading, especially during the Windows boot up. The drive will learn from your and your operating systems habits and it will cache the most frequent used files onto the NAND part of the drive. This will significantly boost your Windows boot up times all the way to SSD levels and it will also help with programs and games that you load often. In our tests, it even booted slightly faster than the SSD.

That makes an SSHD perfect for space constraint setups where you only have room for one 2.5-inch drive. It brings improved loading times as well as a large capacity for a low price.

Pros

• SSD-level boot times
• Improved application load times
• Small size with a large capacity for a fair price
• High compatibility with 2.5-inch 7mm form factor

Cons

• Not faster than traditional drives at standard file operations

“The Seagate FireCuda 2.5″ 2TB SSHD is great for space constrained setups. SSD-level boot times and a large capacity for little money also allows easy builds on a budget.”

Thank you Seagate for providing us with this sample.