Seagate’s FireCuda Forge moves your data between a hard drive and SSD for better performance

Seagate announced a new external storage solution, called the FireCuda Forge, that combines the speed benefits of an SSD with the affordability of a higher-capacity hard drive. The Forge is the first drive that’s powered by the company’s new Alkemi intelligent storage platform, which learns how your data is used and relocates the files you’re currently using, or use most frequently, to the faster SSD. The FireCuda Forge is now available through Seagate’s online store, Newegg, and Best Buy with an 8TB hard drive for $699, or a 20TB hard drive for $899, that are both user-replaceable. However, the NVMe SSD is not included, and in the middle of a memory shortage, that will significantly add to the Forge’s price. Combining a hard drive with flash storage isn’t a new idea. Seagate has been selling hybrid drives with flash memory built in for decades. The Forge lets users choose what hard drive and SSD they want to use together. It sounds similar to network attached storage (NAS) solutions that let you add an SSD where frequently accessed data is temporarily cached, but Seagate says its new FireCuda Forge works differently. The Alkemi technology uses machine learning to dynamically move data from one drive to the other based on your current workload and what data that requires. As your needs and tasks change, the data will be dynamically reorganized across the two drives but will always appear as just a single drive connected to your PC. The FireCuda Forge offers read speeds up to 2,500MB/s and write speeds that top out at 2,000MB/s on computers running at least Windows 11 or macOS 26.