From PC World: An enormous hard drive. A speedy cache. Storage makers have tried to deliver the best of both worlds to content creators for years now, and Seagate’s Alkemi platform is the latest attempt to provide creators what they’ve been asking for. But there’s a catch.
Seagate’s 8TB and 20TB FireCuda Forge external drives are the first to use the Alkemi platform, which combines a traditional “cold” storage drive with a “hot” SSD. But Seagate isn’t supplying the SSD. You are.
Interestingly, the FireCuda Forge drives are external, sitting on your desk. (They measure 9.5 x 5.8 x 2.6 inches and weigh over 4 pounds.) It connects via a USB4 (Thunderbolt) cable to your PC. The SSD lives inside the FireCuda Forge, mounted inside an M.2 slot.
Everyone knows that storage prices have shot up over the last year and a half, and the FireCuda Forge adds a new wrinkle.
Seagate is charging $699 for the 8TB drive and $899 for the 20TB model, and requires that you supply a PCIe Gen 3 M.2 internal SSD that’s (fortunately) less than 1TB. The SSD itself needs to deliver 2,400/2,000MB/s read/write speeds, and Seagate recommends that it include some sort of a RAM cache itself. Those are modest requirements as SSDs go; a Samsung 970 Evo Plus, for example, delivers 3,500/3,300MB/s speeds.
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