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Comparison Products
We compared the 8TB Seagate FireCuda HDD to other HDDs we have on hand, which includes a few 20TB models: the Seagate Skyhawk AI, the Seagate Exos X20, and the Seagate IronWolf Pro. The 8TB competition includes the WD Blue, the Seagate BarraCuda, the Seagate IronWolf Pro, and the older HGST UltraStar He8. We threw in the 6TB WD Black for good measure, as WD’s Black HDD line is a direct competitor to the FireCuda series.
Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark
Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.
The Seagate FireCuda is marketed for gaming, and although one of the best SSDs will give you significantly better load times and performance, the FireCuda is near the top of the HDDs in our gaming test chart. The 8TB Seagate FireCuda scores well in 3DMark, falling right in line with the 20TB drives. The 8TB WD Blue can’t keep up, which isn't surprising given its budget focus.
Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark
PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.
The FireCuda does well in PCMark 10, too, although not as well as it did in 3DMark, as it falls behind the faster 20TB drives. However, the FireCuda easily outclasses the other 8TB drives. In either case, HDDs are not ideal for operating systems or application use, although that can be improved with SSD caching.
Transfer Rates – DiskBench
We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.
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The FireCuda’s copy transfer rate leaves something to be desired. 100 MB/s is reasonable, but we expect that WD’s 8TB Black HDD line would perform better. In fact, the 6TB WD Black leads the FireCuda in both the file copy and read portions of the test. File copy workloads with a diverse and mixed set of file sizes are a typical bottleneck for HDDs, but these speeds are adequate for the typical 1GbE home network.
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Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark
ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that storage vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.
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The FireCuda reaches the expected peak performance in ATTO when given a large enough block size. Smaller block sizes show it lagging a bit, however, but not nearly as much as we see with 5400-RPM-class drives — not to mention the SMR-hindered BarraCuda.
The FireCuda's sequential performance in Crystal Disk Mark is as expected, and its 4KB write latency is surprisingly good. However, the 4KB random read latency is below average. The FireCuda still beats the Blue and BarraCuda HDDs but doesn't compare as well against WD’s OptiNAND technology in the Red Pro, which is an acceptable tradeoff given the FireCuda's much lower price point.
Sustained Write Performance
Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most HDDs implement a write cache which is a fast area of volatile memory such as DRAM. Sustained write speeds directly hit the platters and tend to be consistent. There are exceptions to both of these statements as there are SSHDs (flash-containing hybrid HDDs), OptiNAND drives, and SMR drives that deviate from the traditional configuration. We use Iometer to detect the maximum sustained write speed of the HDD.
The FireCuda shows no anomalies during the sustained write benchmark. It maintains almost 270 MB/s, which is 10 MB/s higher than its official specification.
Power Consumption
We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Some drives can consume watts of power at idle, while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.
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The FireCuda pulls a lot of power at peak and on average, but its high performance enables it to finish the test workload fast enough to match other 8TB drives in efficiency. The X300 looks satisfactory for efficiency if more capacity is required for desktop use, but the IronWolf Pro would be better for NAS at higher capacities.
Test Bench and Testing Notes
| CPU | Intel Core i9-12900K |
| Motherboard | Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero |
| Memory | 2x16GB G.Skill DDR5-5600 CL28 |
| Graphics | Intel Iris Xe UHD Graphics 770 |
| CPU Cooling | Enermax Aquafusion 240 |
| Case | Cooler Master TD500 Mesh V2 |
| Power Supply | Cooler Master V850 i Gold |
| OS Storage | Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Pro |
Conclusion
The Seagate FireCuda HDD is a basic, meat-and-potatoes mechanical hard drive. It hits the right notes with CMR technology and a 7200-RPM spindle speed, has a solid warranty and software support and is affordable at the 8TB sweet spot. It doesn’t perform well in all tests, and the WD Black would generally be the preferred pick for a high-performance desktop solution, but the FireCuda is better than the other alternatives and has unmatched three-year data recovery services included. The FireCuda is also certainly faster than lower RPM drives like the WD Blue, although there are uses for lower-tier 5400-RPM drives like that.
The FireCuda is a solid drop-in HDD with strong software support, a good five-year warranty, and three years of data recovery services. Although marketed for gaming, this drive is best suited for storing media and backups, especially given the great pricing you can currently find on the best SSDs on the market.
Seagate doesn’t complicate this model, so it’s only available at 4TB and 8TB, which is fine as these are the two most popular capacities for desktop PCs. However, these capacities can be limiting, so you will have to reach for the IronWolf series to get better density.
On the whole, there is little to dislike about the FireCuda, and we can recommend it as a basic desktop storage solution. It’s an easy choice, and that’s perfect for its spot in the market. There are better options if you’re looking for something more specific or niche. Still, for general use, the 8TB Seagate FireCuda is a simple way to add a considerable amount of storage to your system without any headaches.
MORE: Best SSDs
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MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs
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Shane Downing is a Contributing Writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering consumer storage, PC hardware, and AI.
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neojack it's a great piece of technology, but i wonder what is the use caseReply
surveillance ? nah the SSD part would wear of too fast
Archive ? an SMR archive drive is cheaper and enough for the task (rare writes, occasional read)
Photo/video editing ? maybe, if youre an individual wanting to save some money. But time = money if it's your job, a bunch of 4TB SSD would fare better on long term.
Gaming ? maybe but you would know that it's not an ideal solution and would want to upgrade to an SSD eventually because of the eventual stuttering.
OS : absolutely not, even the cheapest 128GB sata SSD would be much better. Unless you like to take a coffee while your PC boots.
File server ? hey maybe for a small business, but how do they fare in RAID ? does the SSD cache gets in the way ?
I think 2 of them in raid1 for a file server would be a good solution for a Small Business's file server.
Or maybe more in a software Raid array to avoid compatibility problems ? -
BleuCheddar Reply
What SSD part/cache? It has normal RAM for a cache like any plain HDD has for decades? This isn't an SSHD (it is mentioned throughout the article that it is ann HDD and in the title even).neojack said:it's a great piece of technology, but i wonder what is the use case
surveillance ? nah the SSD part would wear of too fast
Archive ? an SMR archive drive is cheaper and enough for the task (rare writes, occasional read)
Photo/video editing ? maybe, if youre an individual wanting to save some money. But time = money if it's your job, a bunch of 4TB SSD would fare better on long term.
Gaming ? maybe but you would know that it's not an ideal solution and would want to upgrade to an SSD eventually because of the eventual stuttering.
OS : absolutely not, even the cheapest 128GB sata SSD would be much better. Unless you like to take a coffee while your PC boots.
File server ? hey maybe for a small business, but how do they fare in RAID ? does the SSD cache gets in the way ?
I think 2 of them in raid1 for a file server would be a good solution for a Small Business's file server.
Or maybe more in a software Raid array to avoid compatibility problems ?
This is suitable for a NAS that uses ZFS in any configuration-be it a mirror or a RAID config (thanks CMR!), local storage that is sensitive to network latency but not high bandwidth, archiving that has large changes regularly that SMR will choke on or perhaps a drive for storing games (since this is a gaming brand of Seagate's) that weren't designed for SSDs or aimed at an older game collection.
With how cheap NAND is, I don't think anyone would even consider this for an OS drive if they understand current technology or concerns with boot time.
This drive would be functional for any sort of RAID configuration-be it hardware or software, but if for a business, factors like NAS specific firmware and warranties that call out use in RAID configurations or NAS use cases may be preferable unless sensitive on price. But if you're sensitive to costs, getting some 8TB easy stores and shucking them may be worth the loss of RPM (7200 vs. 5400/5640) for the cost savings. -
neojack You are right it's not an sshd ! I was under this impression since they used the name "firecuda"Reply
Ok so, well they released a 7000rpm hdd. Hurray -
Kamen Rider Blade If you're going to list the (Price per TB), you might as well list the (Price per GB) as wellReply
Especially if you want to compare and contrast against Cheapo SSD's.
And use the appropriate ¢ symbol. -
bit_user If you dig into some of the synthetic benchmarks, it's interesting to see where some of the drives fall apart.Reply -
Kamen Rider Blade Reply
I like to see where the SLC cache fails and the true native performance shows up.bit_user said:If you dig into some of the synthetic benchmarks, it's interesting to see where some of the drives fall apart.
I wonder how a Hybrid SSHD with Optane would've performed if it had 16 GiB and beyond of Optane integrated as their "Flash" Buffer solution on top of large DRAM cache that modern HDD's use ( ≥ 2 GiB)
I'm also tired of SSD's w/o DRAM, stop being cheap and give me quality SSD's with DRAM on board. -
bit_user Reply
This is the opposite:Kamen Rider Blade said:I like to see where the SLC cache fails and the true native performance shows up.
The Seagate BarraCuda 8TB and HGST UltraStar He8 8TB seem to be exhibiting SMR-type behavior.
The sustained writes were also quite telling.
Here, HGST UltraStar He8 8TB holds up reasonably well, though at a the second-lowest rate. But the Seagate BarraCuda 8TB seems to be thrashing pretty badly. That might be okay for backups, but not any kind of writing task that's QoS-sensitive. Fortunately, it doesn't exhibit such anomalies during reads. -
Kamen Rider Blade I prefer to use the smallest block size possible down to 1 KiB if possible, and only increasing the Block Size if it's necessary to fit a single drive into a single partition.Reply
I'm not a big fan of wasted space due to large cluster size. -
bit_user Reply
On Linux, you can't use a filesystem block size smaller than the page size. That made it painless, when SSDs switched over to 4 kiB sectors.Kamen Rider Blade said:I prefer to use the smallest block size possible down to 1 KiB if possible, and only increasing the Block Size if it's necessary to fit a single drive into a single partition.
I'm not a big fan of wasted space due to large cluster size.
There's also a scheme (known as the T10 Data Integrity Field (DIF)) for doing host-based error correction that exposes sectors as 520 bytes, instead of 512. Most enterprise drives support this. The extra bits are meant to hold ECC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Integrity_Field
I haven't found clear information on whether it's been extended to 4 kiB sectors, but maybe they just skipped that and went to NVMe's raw mode (I forget what it's called), where the host can bypass most of the block layer normally implemented by the drive firmware.
Regarding sector sizes, there's a similar tradeoff for RAIDs. You have to decide the granularity at which you want to spread data across the different drives. I think the current RAID I have is using a 64 kiB chunk size (stripe size = num_logical_drives * chunk_size), which that first graph I quoted shows to be a safe choice for maximum throughput. However, the tradeoff isn't about speed vs. space-efficiency, but rather what I/O size you want to optimize for. If you make your stripes too large (or too small) for your typical I/O size, then it's just your performance that suffers. -
giorov Reply
"All three drives have a 256MB cache which is adequate for this capacity."BleuCheddar said:What SSD part/cache? It has normal RAM for a cache like any plain HDD has for decades? This isn't an SSHD (it is mentioned throughout the article that it is ann HDD and in the title even).
This is suitable for a NAS that uses ZFS in any configuration-be it a mirror or a RAID config (thanks CMR!), local storage that is sensitive to network latency but not high bandwidth, archiving that has large changes regularly that SMR will choke on or perhaps a drive for storing games (since this is a gaming brand of Seagate's) that weren't designed for SSDs or aimed at an older game collection.
With how cheap NAND is, I don't think anyone would even consider this for an OS drive if they understand current technology or concerns with boot time.
This drive would be functional for any sort of RAID configuration-be it hardware or software, but if for a business, factors like NAS specific firmware and warranties that call out use in RAID configurations or NAS use cases may be preferable unless sensitive on price. But if you're sensitive to costs, getting some 8TB easy stores and shucking them may be worth the loss of RPM (7200 vs. 5400/5640) for the cost savings.