Seagate is selling a hybrid drive again, but the fast half is not in the box.
The FireCuda Forge line pairs a traditional spinning hard drive with a solid-state drive (SSD) that the buyer supplies. It is on sale now through Seagate's web store in two sizes: 8TB for $699 and 20TB for $899. Neither price includes the SSD. It is also the first Seagate hybrid run by the company's new Alkemi intelligent storage platform.
The SSD has to be an M.2 2280 NVMe drive on PCIe Gen3 or newer, with a maximum of 1TB. It needs at least 2,400MB/s read and 2,000MB/s write speeds, and Seagate recommends a model with a DRAM cache. For the combined system, the company claims 2,500MB/s read and 2,000MB/s write over USB4, with support for Windows 11 and macOS 26 or later.
The arithmetic is worth a look. The 12TB step up from the 8TB model costs $200, about $17 per terabyte, while the 20TB model works out to roughly $45 per terabyte overall before the SSD. At the top end, a 1TB SSD covers 5% of the capacity. Seagate's claimed speeds sit almost on top of the minimum SSD spec, which suggests the fast side sets the ceiling for anything it holds.
That raises the old hybrid-drive question: what actually lands on the fast side? Earlier hybrid drives made that call with a small built-in flash cache that users could not see or size. Seagate has not said how Alkemi decides which data stays on the SSD, or what happens to speed once a workload outgrows 1TB. Letting buyers choose the SSD is a real change, but the software's choices will decide whether this beats simply buying an SSD and a hard drive separately.