Seagate Gaming FireCuda 16TB Gaming Hub Review

How Much Does it Cost?

Last month I tested the FireCuda Gaming HDD 1TB, which has an MSRP of $79.99, the 2TB is $109.99, and the 5TB is just $179.99. However, the Gaming Hub is the much bigger and faster solution, offering 8TB and 16TB sizes, and as such, they’ll come in at a much higher price point too. The stock seems a little erratic at the moment, but that’s more to do with the current market and global climate than Seagate. The 8TB has an MSRP of $219.99 and the 16TB $399.99. You can check for up to date stock and prices here.

Overview

When I tested the 2TB model, I was satisfied with the performance. It was slow, but the price and capacity were in check, and for expanding your PC or console storage, it will get the job done. However, for gamers like myself, I need a LOT more storage to deal with many terabytes of backups, ISOs, and ROMs. Filling a 16TB would certainly take some time; that’s a lot of data to shift around. Thankfully, with this drive running more than twice the speed of their lower capacity models, it’s certainly going to ease the process. The same goes with restoring or loading data from the drive, and it’s a heck of a lot faster.

To put the performance into perspective, a Western Digital Red 8TB NAS drive is great for streaming large amounts of data from a NAS, I use them myself to run 4K movies and more. However, they tap out at around 200 MB/s read and 200 MB/s write. The Seagate Gaming FireCuda 16TB Gaming Hub was writing data at 281 MB/s and writing at 258 MB/s, so it’s certainly very capable.

While only around half the speed of a SATA 3 SSD, it’s more than possible to load many games directly from the drive. I wouldn’t bother with the latest Call of Duty or Flight Simulator. However, a lot of PC games from just a few years ago will be absolutely fine. I’ve been streaming Dreamcast and PS3 backups from the drive, and they didn’t skip a beat. Plus, when you consider this drive will hold around 3000 full DVD ISOs, it’s unlikely you’ll be shopping around for another external drive any time soon.

The only thing you should note is a couple of drive mounts on your desktop can give off some vibration. I mean, that’s to be expected of any mechanical drive, of course. Perhaps it’s also just a little more noticeable to me as I haven’t got any mechanical drives in my office these days, short of a NAS device that I have hidden in a remote part of the house. It’s not noisy though, but having it next to my keyboard, I could feel it when moving large amounts of data.

Should I Buy One?

This clearly isn’t the sort of drive everyone needs, but I must admit, having such a huge amount of storage space that’s fairly portable is pretty awesome. I tend to move huge data sets back and forth between my computers and between the arcade machine, where a front end can be 1-8TB, so this kind of drive is perfect for those sorts of applications. Keeping a portable Steam library or just backing up your existing libraries, the larger capacity and speed of the Gaming Hub makes it a real winner.