Seagate's new drive blends HDD space with SSD speed

Seagate has announced the FireCuda Forge, an external storage solution that aims to give you the best of both worlds: the large capacity of a hard drive and the speed of an SSD. It's the first product powered by their Alkemi intelligent storage platform, which uses machine learning to learn how you use your files. It then automatically moves the data you're currently working with to the faster SSD, while keeping everything else on the spacious HDD—and to your computer, it all looks like one single drive.

The Forge is available with either an 8TB or 20TB hard drive (priced at $699 and $899 respectively), and those drives are user-replaceable. However, you'll need to supply your own NVMe SSD, which will add to the cost. The system promises read speeds up to 2,500MB/s and write speeds up to 2,000MB/s on Windows 11 or macOS 26.

This isn't a brand-new concept—hybrid drives have been around for a while. But Seagate says the Forge is different because it dynamically reorganizes data between the two drives in real time based on your current tasks, rather than just caching frequently used files. Would you consider paying for a setup like this to get both speed and capacity in one enclosure?