Seagate firecuda 2.5 vs WD black 2.5

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Fernando_34

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Dec 24, 2016
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I'm looking to buy a new hard-drive to replace my slow 5200 RPM drive that takes forever to load into games, especially Rainbow Six Siege. SSDs are out of my budget, plus I want storage.

Out of these two, Firecuda & Black. Which one is faster? They are both about the same price and have the same amount of storage, 1TB, I just can't seem to find which one is actually faster. Seagate's firecuda is advertised as an SSHD but apparently it's a 5200 RPM drive, while WD Black is known for fast performance which has 7200 RPM.

So which one would be faster really?
The SSHD (firecuda) or HDD (WD black)?
 
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lambo7

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Feb 15, 2013
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Can I ask why Firecuda is better when it's 5200 and black is 7200?
I'm looking to buy either of these for gaming and I'm confused.
Thanks
 
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rkzhao

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Mar 8, 2016
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The area where an HDD especially suffers in performance is random performance. This is due to the mechanical movement required for the head arm to move around to non-sequential locations on the disk, regardless of how fast the underlying disk might be spinning. A SSHD is focused in mitigating that weakness.

The NAND part of the hybrid drive will help it perform much better in random performance than a much faster spinning HDD. Hybrid technology can also be used to boost sequential performance as well but usually it's more reserved for randoms. So it's still possible that sequential performance on a 7200rpm Black will be slightly faster but is not going to be really noticeable.

Also 5200rpm is quieter that 7200rpm, if you care about noise.
 
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rkzhao

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Mar 8, 2016
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A SSHD should be designed to function as a normal HDD when the SSD portion dies, albeit a slow 5200rpm HDD.

I'm personally biased against SSHDs of all kinds but that's in part because I tend to look at storage from more of an enterprise perspective. For regular use, a SSHD is fine given what you get for the relatively low cost. Despite what people might say about one brand vs another, as a whole population, Seagate and WD are pretty equivalent for their current products. Historically, there were periods where one would be better than the other but right now, it's all pretty competitive.

In the marketing and consumer relationship side though, WD has been much better in the client market and Seagate is just now starting to play catch up. Just look at all the WD reps that post on this board. It's also part of why drives like the WD Black have built up such a solid reputation.

Really though, at the end of the day, for gaming, any of these drives will work fine. Gaming workloads are pretty mild for storage devices. You just need a drive that's faster enough to prevent any bottlenecks during gameplay but pretty much any healthy modern drive is good enough for that. A faster drive will in theory reduce load times but you'd need a SSD to actually notice a difference and even then, it can be minimal depending on the game.
 
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