Seagate FireCuda 8TB HDD Review: A Solid Storage Solution

Seagate delivers a meat and potatoes desktop hard drive

By Shane Downing
published
Seagate FireCuda 8TB HDD
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

Tom's Hardware Verdict

The Seagate FireCuda HDD is a nice, affordable solution if you need up to 8TB of high-performance HDD storage. Performance is not hindered by spindle speed or recording technology, and Seagate backs the drive with a decent warranty.

Pros

  • +

    Good all-around performance and efficiency

  • +

    Strong five-year warranty

  • +

    Three years of data recovery services

  • +

    Priced right for a 7200-RPM, CMR solution

  • +

    Full-featured software

Cons

  • -

    Some weak areas in performance

  • -

    Limited capacity options

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The Seagate FireCuda is a mechanical hard drive done right, providing expected performance and being backed by Seagate’s excellent warranty. Seagate didn't compromise with this design, using high-performance CMR technology paired with a 7200 RPM spindle speed. It also offers the sweet spot of 8TB of capacity at a reasonable price per TB, making it perfect for general desktop use. There are reasons to drop down to 5400/5640 RPM if you have concerns about cost, heat, and noise, and that’s where the 8TB WD Blue would come in. However, the FireCuda offers the best all-around package available at this time.

Seagate hasn't had the best reputation for HDD reliability in the past, but it’s difficult to find fault with its warranty. The Seagate FireCuda has the standard five-year warranty that includes Seagate’s three-year Rescue Data Recovery Services, which guarantees one attempt at data recovery (Seagate claims a relatively good 90% track record for recoveries). Seagate also provides software to cover the most common storage processes, which makes the FireCuda a drop-in solution. It’s not the fastest drive on the market, but its performance is more than adequate for use as general storage. Its biggest shortcoming is perhaps that it’s not offered in larger capacities.

Specifications

Swipe to scroll horizontally
ProductSeagate FireCuda HDD
Capacity8TB
Model #ST8000DX001
Pricing$145.99
Cost per TB$18.25
InterfaceSATA 6 Gb/s
Form Factor3.5"
TechnologyCMR
RPM7200
Sustained Transfer RateUp to 260 MB/s
Cache256MB
Operating Power9.0W
Noise32 dB
Workload Rate Limit300 TB/year
MTBFN/A
Warranty5-Year (3-Year Data Recovery)

The 8TB Seagate FireCuda is currently on sale for $145.99, or $18.25 per TB, which keeps it competitive. The 8TB Seagate IronWolf and the Toshiba X300 both carry a similar price tag. The FireCuda has a better warranty than both, at five years with three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services, and also performs better than the IronWolf with a sustained transfer rate of up to 260 MB/s. All three drives have a 256MB cache which is adequate for this capacity.

The 8TB Seagate BarraCuda HDD is somewhat less expensive but is not a direct competitor as it uses the slower and less versatile SMR technology and runs at 5400 RPM. The 8TB WD Blue is the real budget alternative, but it only has a two-year warranty and weaker performance due to its lower 5640-RPM spindle speed.

Software and Accessories

Seagate’s FireCuda HDD includes the Seagate DiscWizard software for cloning, partition management, data backup, and more. You can also download the SeaTools software to monitor drive health, update firmware, and more. These are basic functions, but having a full suite of support is nice.

A Closer Look

Image 1 of 4
Seagate FireCuda 8TB HDD
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The FireCuda has an attractive label design but is otherwise what you’d expect from a standard 3.5" 6Gb/s SATA hard drive. Seagate does not use any sort of flash technology in this drive as WD does in its Red Pro, so internally, it has the typical spindle and drive controllers along with a 256MB DRAM cache. 

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Shane Downing
Shane Downing
Freelance Reviewer

Shane Downing is a Freelance Reviewer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering consumer storage hardware.

22 Comments Comment from the forums
  • neojack
    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 ?
    Reply
  • BleuCheddar
    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 ?
    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.
    Reply
  • neojack
    You are right it's not an sshd ! I was under this impression since they used the name "firecuda"

    Ok so, well they released a 7000rpm hdd. Hurray
    Reply
  • Kamen Rider Blade
    If you're going to list the (Price per TB), you might as well list the (Price per GB) as well
    Especially if you want to compare and contrast against Cheapo SSD's.

    And use the appropriate ¢ symbol.
    Reply
  • 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
    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 like to see where the SLC cache fails and the true native performance shows up.

    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.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Kamen Rider Blade said:
    I like to see where the SLC cache fails and the true native performance shows up.
    This is the opposite:

    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.
    Reply
  • 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.

    I'm not a big fan of wasted space due to large cluster size.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    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.
    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.

    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.
    Reply
  • giorov
    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.
    "All three drives have a 256MB cache which is adequate for this capacity."
    Reply